Westminster Hall

Thursday 12th March 2015 Westminster Hall

Thursday 12 March 2015

[Annette Brooke in the Chair]

Backbench Business

Thursday 12th March 2015 Westminster Hall

Police and Children

Thursday 12th March 2015 Westminster Hall

Motion made, and Question proposed, That the sitting be now adjourned.—(Anne Milton.)

13:30

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Brooke, to discuss a subject in which I know you are very interested. You may have to restrain yourself from nodding, disagreeing or making a contribution. I am pleased that we have been granted the opportunity to debate this important subject; it is a shame that the 643 other hon. Members were not able to join us, or at least a good portion of them. However, the relationship between children and the police is important and topical.

We come here in an environment of falling youth crime figures, which is welcome, and a falling number of young people held in youth offender institutions. We also come here in the wake of significant recent publicity about child sexual exploitation and the role, historically and recently, of the police in recognising and dealing with that.

We are also here at a time of continuing high levels of children in care and, as an interesting article in today’s Times shows, high levels of children suffering from mental health problems—all children and young people who disproportionately come into contact with the police. Perhaps even more topical is the relationship between the police and children and young people who are vulnerable to being radicalised and end up leaving our shores to go and fight for causes in other places, which is another aspect of the relationship between children and the police that I want to touch on.

Clearly, as I think we would all agree, a good, positive, constructive relationship between the police and children and young people is needed from an early age; it is important to get off on the right footing. If I remember rightly, thinking back to the ancient history of my school days, the local bobby was a friendly figure that we could not just ask the time from, but confide in. The police community liaison bobby would come to the school regularly and was somebody we could trust and approach, not somebody we feared.

The attitude is very different these days, 40 or 50 years on. We increasingly see headlines about high levels of stop and search involving young people, although, fortunately, there has been progress on reducing that through the initiative from the Home Secretary. We hear a lot about children in the care system in particular—very vulnerable children—getting into trouble with the police. The debate about the age of criminal responsibility is ongoing; at the age of 10 in this country, that is obviously one of the lowest in the western world.

There seems to be a looming mindset in society that often sees children as part of the problem, rather than, as I would support, part of the solution to society’s ills. Too often, we are telling young people and children what not to do, rather than encouraging them to take their initiative and develop their character and self-confidence. There has been a culture of what I call “No ball games here”, where society is becoming increasingly intolerant of children and young people in public spaces, with a willingness to label their behaviour as social or anti social, when in fact it is normal, growing-up behaviour for children, teenagers and so on, as we have all experienced.

In that environment, the all-party parliamentary group for children, of which I am a vice-chair and in which you are involved, Mrs Brooke, produced a comprehensive and worthwhile report entitled “‘It’s all about trust’: Building good relationships between children and the police”. It was published at the end of October, following an interim report that we published in July and 18 months of work in which we interviewed and took written evidence from senior police officers, front-line officers from Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and Her Majesty’s inspectorate of probation, police commissioners, the Youth Justice Board, justice organisations, children’s charities, youth groups and, crucially, a great many children and young people. We held a number of evidence sessions at Westminster, took many written submissions and arranged a visit to Cookham Wood young offenders institution.

On behalf of the all-party group, I thank all the many people who were involved and gave generously of their time in this study, and especially the police for their enthusiastic and positive engagement. I am sure that Baroness Massey, chairman of the all-party group, would like me to make that point and to thank our secretariat, the National Children’s Bureau, for the enormous amount of work it did in producing the report.

The report’s aims were threefold. We asked, first, what do children and young people think about the police, and what are the experiences of particularly vulnerable groups of children and young people who have higher levels of contact with police forces? Secondly, how do police forces work and engage with children and young people? Thirdly, does police practice and the policy and legislative framework underpinning the work of the police need to be improved to promote better well-being of children and young people?

The report comes in a climate, as I saw in my time as Minister for children and young people, of a disproportionate cut in youth services at local authority level, which in some cases has removed a number of safe, positive places for children and young people to go to. Alongside that, however, I have to say that that has helped to foster a new partnership between many people in the youth sector: between youth charities, local authority youth departments and, in many cases, private businesses that are interested in providing facilities and helping young people.

There was also the Government’s “Positive for Youth” paper, which I published two years ago, and which came up with lots of innovative projects going on with young people. There has been the roll-out of 63 myplace state-of-the-art youth centres, mostly in inner-city areas around the country. Initiatives such as OnSide, which took on some of those myplace centres, have engaged young people with the local community, the police, businesses and many other organisations. However, we all need to realise that there has been a disproportionate cut to what is seen as a soft touch—youth services at local level—which is unfortunate.

The inquiry’s work was based on two key principles that reflected our commitment to the UN convention on the rights of the child: first, that in every context, every person under the age of 18 should be treated as a child first and foremost, with all professionals who come into contact with them having regard to a child’s welfare and well-being. Too often, we treat children—if they are under 18, they are children—as mini-adults, rather than age-appropriately, particularly when it comes to contact with the police that may lead to arrest and custody.

The second key principle on which we based the inquiry was that children and young people’s voices must be heard and their opinions respected, which is a subject that you and I, Mrs Brooke, have often raised in Committee on various pieces of legislation over the many years in which we have worked on those subjects.

The report comes up with a number of worrying, if not wholly surprising, findings. The inquiry heard that children and young people’s attitudes towards the police are often characterised by feelings of mistrust and sometimes fear, and that encounters between the two groups are often characterised by poor, unconstructive communication and a lack of mutual respect. However, many children and young people accepted that the police have an important job to do and work to make their communities safer, although many also said that they do not believe that the police are there to protect them. That is particularly worrying because, as we all know, children and young people are statistically much more likely than older people to be victims of crime. It is therefore even more important that they see and appreciate that the role of the police is to protect them.

Some children and young people told us that they feel humiliated by the police and are convinced that the aim of the police is to target and undermine them. As one person said to the inquiry,

“if young people feel like they are being targeted, this alone is enough to create a negative attitude towards the police—regardless of whether… the police are in fact targeting them.”

It is worth noting that feelings of mistrust and negative perceptions can be passed on from generation to generation. Some young people who gave evidence described being wary of the police from a very young age, before they had actually had any interaction with them, because of the negative attitudes of their own parents, older siblings or other family members. That cultural apprehension about and mistrust of the police is much more difficult to address and remedy, hence my opening gambit that the earlier we establish positive relations and images for young people, the more likely we are to succeed.

There is some inevitability in all this. A degree of confrontation is inevitable. The police represent authority at a time in young people’s lives when they are perhaps least likely to be receptive to having their behaviour regulated—as the father of three teenagers, I think I can vouch for that. However, this is a big issue that affects a large number of children and young people, who do come into contact with the police.

The figures that we have available for 2013, which we put in our report, are that in England and Wales there were 129,274 arrests of children and young people, including 11,369 under the age of 14, so 9% of all the arrests were of those aged 13 and younger—young children. The good news is that that represented a fall of some 59% between 2008 and 2013, and the number of young people in young offenders institutions has fallen substantially.

However, stop-and-search has been a particularly contentious manifestation of the frequent interface between police and children and young people. The Home Secretary is to be congratulated on the new approaches that she has driven forward in that respect, but we heard from children and young people that, too often, police still do not explain the process or the reason for the stop in the first place.

The all-party group sent freedom of information requests to all 43 police forces and the British Transport police. Of those 44 forces, 26 responded, so this is not based on a complete response. We learned that between 2009 and 2013, more than 1 million stop-and-searches were carried out on children under the age of 18. What was particularly interesting about the figures was the big divergence between one force and the next. The percentage of stop-and-searches within a force area carried out on under-18s varied from 13% in one right up to 28%—well over one quarter—in another, and in 19 of the 26 force areas, between 20% and 25% of all stop-and-searches carried out were on children and young people. That is worrying in itself. Why are police in one area stopping on average twice as many children as they are in another? That gives rise to concerns about inconsistency in the way guidance and the law are being applied.

There was a feeling among many of the children and young people we interviewed that stop-and-search is being used on children and young people too frequently and without good reason. Clearly, the Home Secretary agreed, given her intervention. Indeed, HMIC itself found that 27% of stop slips, which provide a record of stop-and-search, did not record reasonable grounds for a lawful search. That would provide evidence for the claims made by many of the witnesses who came to us. Another worry is that stop-and-searches have been used disproportionately on certain groups of children and young people, particularly those from black and minority ethnic backgrounds and those from disadvantaged city areas.

Why is all this important? As I said, if the first contact between a child and the police is negative, let alone one that is really unreasonable and unjustified, that will shape the young person’s attitude to the police the next time he or she comes into contact with them. That can change the dynamics of how children and young people view the police—not so much as people who are there to protect them and to whom they should go for help and safety, but as a body that they should be wary of because they are viewed as a suspected offender rather than as the victim they are much more likely to be, as I have already explained.

There is also a worrying impact on certain vulnerable groups. One is children in care. We are all too familiar with the disadvantages to which children in the care system, despite the improvements, are subject. They are greatly over-represented in the youth justice system and among children registered as missing. It is the case that 6.2% of children in care who are aged between 10 and 17 are convicted of a criminal offence or subject to a final warning. That compares with 1.5% of children and young people as a whole, so a child in care is over four times more likely to get involved in the youth justice system.

There is an additional group of people with vulnerabilities through special educational needs, language or communication difficulties and mental health needs. As we know, those with mental health needs account for more than 60% of people in the youth justice system. The needs of those young people can be overlooked or exacerbated in encounters with the police, which can be particularly frightening for them if things are not carried out in a way that is sensitive to their disabilities.

More topically, the way police treat children who have been trafficked or experienced sexual abuse was described to our inquiry as a “postcode lottery”. Those are the very children, as we have seen in Rotherham, Rochdale and Oxfordshire recently, who most need to be able to trust the police, to go to the police when they are being abused in some way, to ask for their help and to be believed and to have their case taken up. However, they can also be at increased risk of involvement in crime themselves, committing offences, often as a survival strategy—stealing food or money—when fleeing from abusers. That is not to excuse their crime, but, again, sensitivity is required as to the particular challenges that they face.

We heard from the witnesses to the inquiry that there is something of a postcode lottery in the way the police deal with children and young people. There are big variations in the figures between police forces. The most vulnerable children, who most need the protection and comfort of the police, can often be those who are least trusting of the police. For too many children, their first contact with the police is in a crisis situation. There appear to be a lack of opportunities to meet and communicate with the police in a positive, non-conflict environment, where they could create the empathetic relationship that bodes well for the future.

That was the negative stuff, and there is a good deal of negative stuff in our findings. The findings in the report are comprehensive and we need to be open and frank about appreciating the extent of the problem, but I want now to look at the good practice, what can be done to improve things and, indeed, where things are improving.

As I said at the outset, the police engaged very constructively and fully with the inquiry. After the report’s publication, we held a summit in the House of Lords. It involved the all-party group and some very senior police officers. There will be a further follow-up meeting in June to report on the progress that has been made. The report will not simply be put on a shelf and left to gather dust; we will keep coming back to it and looking at the progress that police and others are making in taking our findings seriously. The signs that the police are keen to do so are encouraging.

Throughout the inquiry, we saw numerous examples of good practice, which were largely based on encouraging positive contact between children, young people and police at an early stage, not simply when the finger of blame is being pointed at those children or young people. Hon. Members will be familiar with some of those initiatives. The volunteer police cadets initiative is particularly strong in my constituency. They are a fantastic and impressive group of young men and women. Safer school partnerships help to break down barriers and negative perceptions. In some of those partnerships, community support officers are based in schools, where they work with pupils who are particularly at risk of offending.

I want to speak up for the police and crime commissioner in Sussex, Katy Bourne, who has been at the vanguard of efforts such as those I have described. She has engaged closely with the inquiry and been very proactive in promoting this agenda in Sussex. She reported on the results of a 2010 survey of more than 3,500 young people, which showed that younger children who had less contact with the police viewed them far more positively than did older children who had experienced more contact. Surely the reverse should be true. If we and the police are getting it right, the more people see of and know about the police, the more positive people will feel towards them. The survey made it clear that, for too many people, the reverse is true.

Katy Bourne set up the Sussex youth commission, and I have been to several of its meetings. In September, at the Amex stadium in Falmer, we had an event called the big conversation. The young people who participated in that exercise engaged with senior officers, including the chief constable and the police and crime commissioner, and they came up with some interesting and impressive suggestions, which were not rocket science but were well researched and had the backing of other young people. The original members of that group have formed a youth independent advisory group, which will help Sussex police to examine and implement their recommendations and has proposed solutions on an ongoing basis. The police commissioner’s office gives support and training to youth members of the advisory group, which provides a constructive and creative environment in which to challenge existing police practices and policy.

The chief constable engaged fully for the whole of the big conversation event, and I found it really encouraging that at the end he got up and undertook to take away the recommendations; to implement, as a matter of urgency, as many of them as he possibly could; and to report back to the young people on the progress that had been made in doing so. That was a real commitment. The new chief constable, Giles York, is doing a fantastic job and really appreciates the importance of engaging and dealing appropriately with young people. Next week, a meeting of the independent advisory group will focus on the use by Sussex police of stop-and-search. There is some really encouraging stuff going on in my area.

If I may blow my own trumpet, I would like to mention a project that I set up a few years ago called Midnight Football. People had complained to me—as they probably do to you, Mrs Brooke, and to the Minister and shadow Minister—that on Friday and Saturday evenings, young people sometimes get a bit the worse for wear in the town centre, one thing leads to another, there is a bit of antisocial behaviour and the police become involved. Many people say, “There is nowhere else for them to go.” I found out about the Midnight Football project, which started in Dundee, in Scotland, and I went to see the local chief inspector to ask whether we could run a similar project in one of the town centres in my constituency where we had had a few problems. He said that it sounded like a good idea, and he offered to give us a couple of officers for every evening on which we wanted to run it.

I spoke to a couple of local councillors, who were very positive about it and found us a little bit of money—it did not cost much. The local leisure centre offered the use of its facilities between 10 pm and midnight on a Saturday evening, and the local football club, of which I am president, gave us a couple of referees. Interestingly, the only people who were not terribly positive about the project were from the local youth service, who told us, “We already run a football project at 4 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon.” Great, but that is not when the problem is happening.

We went ahead with the project and ran it throughout the summer on a Saturday evening. We had between 40 and 50 13 to 17-year-old boys coming along, and a few girls as well. The project went really well. The police rated it so much that they sent a police football team along to play against some of the kids. That went down fantastically with the kids, especially when the chief inspector was carried off with a damaged knee. The interesting thing about the project was that the dynamics between the police and the kids completely changed. Some of the kids said to me, “If I was not here doing this, I would probably be getting up to no good on a street corner.” For some of the children and young people, their only previous interaction with the police had been when they had been hauled up on suspicion of having done something wrong. The next time the police came into contact with them, they said things like, “You’ve got a handy right foot, haven’t you?” They started to talk about football and some of the positive things that the young person had done. This is not rocket science but that sort of positive stuff absolutely changes the relationship between authority and children and young people, who are too often victimised. We need more such projects to happen in every town centre around the country.

I recognise the pressures on funding for police officers working closely with schools. Gone are the days when the local bobby was seen frequently in our schools telling us how to keep safe. However, it is a false economy not to do more at an early stage with our children and young people. I am glad that the Mayor’s office, for example, has dedicated funds to enabling Metropolitan police officers to continue the work of some of the safer schools projects in London schools.

The volunteer police cadet scheme is open to members between the ages of 13 and 18 and there is an expectation under the national police cadets framework that a quarter of cadets should come from a vulnerable background. That is not rocket science if we want to engage with children in care, those who have disabilities or who are at risk of exclusion. If those children see other kids from the same background putting on a police cadet uniform and engaging positively with the police, they are more likely to take notice than if we tell them that that is what they should be doing. The scheme is a really good one. As Jack, aged 17, told the inquiry:

“Being a police cadet has helped me to build confidence in myself, and it’s also helped me understand who the police are, what they do on a day-to-day basis, and it’s really helped me build relations with officers, and others, in social situations. Also, from a care end, an independence is gained. It’s given me vital experience that can only benefit me when that aspect of life changes.”

That was a common refrain that we heard from young people who took part in the volunteer police cadets and similar projects. It was pointed out during the inquiry that the cadet scheme may appeal only to certain children and young people, and that those who were most disengaged from society and most hostile to the police might be the least likely to consider involvement with a uniformed group that was run by the police. We need to put in the extra effort that is required to show them that the police are their friends and protectors as much as anyone from any other backgrounds.

We saw other examples of good practice, such as that of Telford and Wrekin children in care council. I was keen to promote that organisation during my time as a Minister and to make sure that every local authority area in the country—with the exception of the City of London and the Scilly Isles, which had no children in care—had a children in care council. They are a great interface between children in care and social workers, directors of children’s services departments, councillors and police officers. Telford and Wrekin children in care council has been working with the police to improve negative attitudes towards the police among children in care. To start with, officers have attended meetings in plain clothes, allowed children to try on their uniforms and demonstrated some of their equipment.

There is a gap in police training. I believe that that is a particular problem. In Sussex, the youth commission has enabled young people to have direct input into face-to-face training with police officers, and to do some of the interviewing for senior police appointments. According to Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary, 90% of police officers receive no further training on stop-and-search once they have completed their initial training programme. That is why it is really beneficial to deploy children and young people in a training role for the continuous professional development that is required in many aspects of policing. None of that is rocket science, but it is not happening in enough places.

Youth members of Second Wave came to see us. They described working with the Metropolitan police in Lewisham to develop specialist police training for the use of stop-and-search against under-18s. That training programme includes key elements of effective practice to ensure that the stop-and-search process takes place in a calm and positive manner, with young people made fully aware of the reasons for the stop and of how they can raise any concerns. Training methods include role play, trust building and communication exercises, which are presented by Second Wave members.

Data collection on stop-and-search in relation to children and young people is a problem because data are not collected nationally, which is why we had to go down the freedom of information route. Details of where good practice or bad practice are happening are patchy, so we welcome the Home Office proposals for national crime maps and best use of stop-and-search schemes, which will be created by the Home Office and the College of Policing and endorsed by all 43 regional police forces. National consistency, which we do not have at the moment, is crucial. That is why we are greatly encouraged by ACPO’s response to the report, which has been sent out to other hon. Members. I will read out some of the highlights from that response:

“The ACPO National Children and Young Person Business Area were very grateful to the APPG for undertaking this enquiry… the lead of the business area changed to DCC Olivia Pinkney.”

Olivia Pinkney is also the deputy chief constable of Sussex—we lead where others follow. ACPO also said that it was choosing

“to align…priorities with the ones highlighted in the ‘It’s all about trust’ report. Since the enquiry we have developed a new national strategy for the policing of Children and Young People. Within the strategy are 4 key priorities namely: Stop and search; Custody detention and criminalisation; Children in care; Relationship between young people and the police.”

ACPO has also been

“talking with the College of Policing to explore options regarding vulnerability training for officers. We have established a network of strategic leads for the policing of children and young people in every force, and we held our first national conference…last November. We have also established a Chief Officer lead for every region and this will be the mechanism for providing strategic leadership and sharing good practice across the country.”

ACPO says that the Home Office’s best use of stop-and-search scheme will be used, following the scheme’s key principles, which will lead to increased scrutiny and transparency. ACPO looks forward to a further meeting with the all-party group to report on progress. That is positive, constructive and practical action, which has come from ACPO’s engagement with the inquiry, and it is to the police’s great credit.

ACPO also stated:

“Through the College of Policing we will be working with the Early Intervention Foundation to identify good practice in the area of crime prevention and young people. We will be using our national network to share this good practice and also look at promising practice, which is yet to be evaluated.”

We all know the benefits of the Early Intervention Foundation, and you and I, Mrs Brooke, fought to have it established. The principle of getting in early to work with children and young people is at the heart of ACPO’s plans.

There are a couple of other areas that I want to address before I finish; I know that many others want to speak, not least those on the Front Benches. There is a problem with the detention of children and young people. Research by the Howard League for Penal Reform in 2011 found that there were more than 40,000 overnight detentions of children aged 17 and under in police stations across England and Wales, including 2,000 children aged between 10 and 13. That equates to almost 800 children being kept overnight in police cells each and every week. The all-party group welcomes the commitment of HMIP and HMIC to address the situation through a joint thematic inspection on the welfare of vulnerable people in police custody, which will include a focus on children and young people and will report later in the spring.

There is a worry about young people being kept in police custody overnight following charge, because that breaches legislation stating that, if a child or young person under 17 is refused bail following charge, they should be transferred to local authority accommodation prior to their court appearance. That is not happening. There is a further issue about 17-year-olds. A 17-year-old is a child but, as it stood, the guidance referred to under-17s. We are pleased that the Home Secretary has responded and that the regulations are being changed so that a 17-year-old will be treated in the same way as any other child, because he or she is a child.

There is also an issue of how we deal with children and young people with mental health problems. We know that the closure of child and adolescent mental health services in some places led to the police increasingly holding children and young people in detention for child protection reasons. In 2012-13, 580 children and young people aged under 18 were detained under section 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983, of whom an estimated 45% were taken into police custody. Again, the all-party group welcomes the Government’s commitment to ensuring that children and young people are no longer detained in police custody under section 136, as set out in the mental health crisis care concordat published jointly by the Department of Health and the Home Office in February 2014.

Children held in custody need to be dealt with differently from adults held in custody. The all-party group recommends that children should be held in appropriate accommodation separate from adults; I have made the point about their going into local authority care. Children should be kept out of police custody wherever possible, and the environment in which they are held should be improved better to reflect the rights and needs of their ages.

The all-party group recommends that the Home Office should ensure that all newly built custody facilities include a separate custody area for children and young people, with police forces designating existing facilities for that use wherever possible, and that a requirement should be placed on local safeguarding children boards to monitor that transfer. There are key issues regarding children and young people with mental health problems who are kept in custody overnight. Practice needs to be improved, and the guidance needs to be beefed up. Those are two key recommendations from our report.

I have a couple of minor points to make and then I will finish on our major recommendations. Children and young people should be able to access high-quality advocacy and legal support during their time in police custody. In some cases, that advocacy will not be provided by their parents, whether or not their parents are available and whether or not their parents understand the situation.

Other responses to how we deal with vulnerable children include the initiative by the communications charity I Can, which has developed a training course called “Talk about Talk.” The course is co-delivered by young people with speech and learning needs to support youth justice system workers, including police officers, to improve the way in which they communicate with children and young people suffering from speech and language difficulties. We need to be much more sensitive to particularly vulnerable groups of young people who are coming into contact with the police.

Finally, our report makes 24 recommendations. All those recommendations are doable, and they are all perfectly sensible and practical. All the recommendations ring in tune with the points that I have raised. First, we want the Home Office, working with the College of Policing and the Youth Justice Board, to identify and share examples of good practice. Governments of this country are rubbish at disseminating best practice. When I was a Minister, I found that if a really good project to safeguard young people or children was taking place in one authority, it was no surprise if the neighbouring authority had never heard of it and was not beating a path to the door to ask, “Gosh, how can we do that here?”

Secondly, every police force should have a designated senior officer of ACPO rank with responsibility for procedures and practice for children and young people. Thirdly, police effectiveness, efficiency and legitimacy assessments should include a focus on the quality of engagement with children and young people. Fourthly, police and crime commissioners should establish mechanisms for involving young people in their work, as we clearly already do in Sussex.

Fifthly, the national policing lead for police cadets should encourage police forces to work with the National Volunteer Police Cadets to extend the reach of the volunteer police cadet programme. Sixthly, the Home Office should examine how all police forces could deliver safer schools partnerships; I know that there has been a problem with Government funding for that. Seventhly, the College of Policing should review police training, and I have mentioned some ways that we could achieve that. Eighthly, the College of Policing should promote the direct involvement of children and young people in the training of police in their local areas.

Ninthly, the best use of stop-and-search scheme to promote good practice in relation to the stop-and-search of children and young people should be carried forward by encouraging police forces to improve the recording of data, enabling young people to participate in public scrutiny, promoting clear complaints mechanisms and setting out procedures for police liaison with child protection teams. Tenthly, the national policing lead on stop-and-search should ensure that all police forces have in place independent stop-and-search scrutiny panels. Eleventhly, the HMIC annual review of stop-and-search should report on its use on children. Twelfthly, the Home Secretary should announce that stop-and-search data will be made available to the public in local crime maps, including data on the stop-and-search of children.

Thirteenthly, the Government should revise statutory guidance to the police on carrying out stop-and-search so that the safety and welfare of the child must be a paramount consideration and the date of birth of children stopped should be recorded. Fourteenthly, the College of Policing should publish guidance with an authorised professional practice following public consultation on the use of stop-and-search procedures for vulnerable children. Again, I have discussed that. Fifteenthly, there should be a presumption against the stop-and-search of under-10-year-olds, except in exceptional circumstances. Sixteenthly, the Home Office should ensure that all newly built police custody facilities include a separate custody area for children and young people. Seventeenthly, the Government should amend section 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983 to ensure that no child or young person is detained in police custody under the Act by 2017, and preferably sooner.

Eighteenthly, the definition of a juvenile in the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 should be amended to ensure that 17-year-olds are treated as minors. That recommendation has already been picked up by the Home Secretary. Nineteenthly, the Home Secretary and Education Secretary jointly should write to all police forces and local authorities reminding them of their statutory duties under the Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984, to ensure that where a child or young person is to be detained post-charge, they are transferred to the care of a local authority.

Twentiethly, all liaison and diversion should provide dedicated and tailored support to children and young people. Twenty-firstly, the College of Policing should set up standards requiring all police forces to have a scrutiny panel in place to monitor the use of out-of-court disposals. Twenty-secondly, the College of Policing should ensure that the training of custody officers covers legal representation for children and young people, and the Chartered Institute of Legal Executives should develop an accredited training course for solicitors and legal practitioners wishing to work with children and young people in police custody. Penultimately, crimes committed by children and young people within residential care homes should be managed appropriately. Last but not least, the College of Policing should work with the Youth Justice Board and local criminal justice boards to develop a protocol to reduce the prosecution of children in care.

The recommendations are well thought out. They can be taken on board, as some already have been, jointly by Government, the College of Policing, the Youth Justice Board and others responsible, working with local authorities, to consider how they can be brought into effect over the next few years. I am pleased with the report and proud to be a member of the all-party group that produced it.

There is a problem in this country with how too many of our children and young people view the police. The way to start addressing that problem is to recognise its extent. There is a big differential among certain forces and how they deal with the issue, and there are great examples of good practice already happening that need to be disseminated nationally. Children and young people are the same whether they are in your constituency, Mrs Brooke, mine or those of the Government and Opposition spokespeople. We need greater consistency in practice around the country.

I think that progress has been made, and that there is a genuine recognition of the need to deal with the issue much more seriously and urgently—not least because of recent revelations about child sexual exploitation and the potential radicalisation of children and young people, which the case of three young girls going to Syria has highlighted. This is an important subject. It is important that we get it right for our children and young people. It is important that the police get it right, and I have no doubt that they want to. It will make their job easier if young people trust them, feel safe with them and provide them with information about how they can do their job better.

It is in everybody’s interests for the report to be read and taken seriously, and for its recommendations to be taken up by all parties. I have no doubt that the positive response and attitude demonstrated by the Home Secretary is a good omen in respect of our recommendations being carried forward by the Government over the coming weeks and months.

14:15

[Jack Dromey (Birmingham, Erdington) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Brooke. I congratulate the hon. Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) on initiating the debate and on his distinguished track record on these issues. Most recently, he has championed the victims of child sexual exploitation and abuse, playing a role in helping to create the great national will to which we in the House must now rise.

I welcome the report of the all-party parliamentary group on children on building good relationships between children and the police. It is, dare I say, one of the finest examples of work by an all-party group in the House in a very long time. The inquiry took the best part of 18 months and involved going out, listening to, engaging with and learning lessons from young people and the police. The report is exemplary, and the hon. Gentleman and all those involved are to be congratulated on what they have done.

I start by telling a story from my constituency that I hope will warm the cockles of the hon. Gentleman’s heart. The November before last, we had the first Erdington convention; there are 10 devolved districts in Birmingham. We had a session on the police, with particular emphasis on the police and young people. In the spirit of the all-party group, a local councillor—I will not mention which party he was from—made a prolonged intervention with a five-point critique of the police for failing to deal with the problem of young people. He must have mentioned “the problem” at least a dozen times. Sitting to my left was Inspector Paul Ditta, who listened patiently. When the tirade ended, he said, “Councillor, you are entitled to your view, but I have to say, I could not disagree more. For us, young people are not a problem; they are a community to be engaged with.” I thought then, as I think now, “Wow. That’s exactly the kind of mindset you want on the part of the police.”

I remember another occasion when a sergeant was presiding over a meeting of the Castle Vale tasking group, which at one stage got quite heated on the issue of ball games. Two individuals in particular were arguing. One of them said, “It’s about time you felt their collar.” The sergeant, again, listened patiently and said, “I’m not sure that that is the appropriate response. What we’ll do is, one of us, together with the youth worker, will go and sit down with those young people, have a chat and help them recognise that they are inconveniencing local people by playing in this particular part of Castle Vale, and encourage them to take advantage of local facilities.” Indeed, one of the sergeant’s constable colleagues said, “We might even challenge them to a game of football.” Again, that is exactly the right mindset on the part of the police.

An oft-quoted Robert Peel maxim is that the police are the public and the public are the police. Effective modern policing is based on mutual trust and the building of good relationships—in this case, crucially, at the earliest possible age—between people and the police. Indeed, as the all-party group’s report states, children’s first encounter with police officers can have a lasting effect on how they view the police and how they subsequently engage with them as adults.

Again, I have seen such examples—good and bad. On the one hand, I remember in Rossendale and Darwen talking to a community group, and an excellent local community activist said that her daughter, who is now 18, had known the local police constable and the local police community support officer since she was eight. They were on first-name terms; in fact, they even sent each other Christmas cards. On the other, there are bad examples. I remember a young African man from Kingstanding in my constituency who came in with his mother to see me and spoke graphically about his experience of having been stopped and searched. He is a fine footballer of the future and an admirable young man who has never been in trouble; his behaviour is exemplary. He said to me, “Jack, I was out with my mum in the high street. I crossed the road to go to another shop. As I came out, I was stopped and I was searched, and I couldn’t believe it. I asked, ‘Why?’ I couldn’t believe it. Then, I saw my mum on the other side of the street, looking distressed.” He said, “I felt humiliated.” He went on to say, “I know bad boys, but I’m not one of them, Jack.” Fortunately, that young man from a good family will not draw the wrong conclusions, but too often there have been such bad experiences, which have poisoned the relationship between young people and the police.

Therefore, for the reasons that the hon. Gentleman spelled out in considerable detail, first impressions are crucial. It is vital that the police deal with their relationships with young people in the right way.

The report is balanced in its approach; it celebrates what is good and the progress that has been made, but it is also challenging. It is worrying that it found that there is a lack of trust in the police on the part of too many children and young people, and that encounters between the two can often be characterised by poor and unconstructive communication and sometimes, quite simply, a lack of mutual respect.

As set out in the United Nations convention on the rights of the child, children and young people have a distinct set of rights and entitlements. As the all-party group found, however, even if improvements are being made, the policy and legislative framework governing the police does not yet pay sufficient attention to the particular needs of children and young people. That must now change.

I will now touch upon certain areas of the report. First, there is the controversial issue of stop and search. The hon. Gentleman was absolutely right to say that only a small proportion of searches lead to arrest and are, to be frank, ultimately found to be justified. The fact that we have too often had too many stops and searches has been damaging to police relationships with young people; there is no question about that. There is that particularly stark statistic in London—someone is seven times more likely to be stopped if they have a black face. That cannot be right.

The resentment caused by that has created barriers between communities and the police. Police officers should act only where there are good grounds for them to do so, and they must ensure that the welfare of children being searched is their utmost priority. Therefore, I strongly support the recommendation of the all-party group that the rights and specific needs of children must be reflected in the guidance relating to the stop-and-search process. The hon. Gentleman is also right to refer to the fact that progress has been made, with support from all parties in the House in recent months for changing the framework governing stop and search.

I will move on briefly to the detention and custody of young people, with particular reference to those suffering from mental ill health. We agree with the recommendation in the report in respect of section 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983, which deals with detentions, and we also believe that it is inappropriate to detain young people in police custody. It is far better that they are dealt with in other, more appropriate ways; it is better not only for young people themselves, which is the main consideration, but for the police, as less of their time will be taken up.

Again, I see that situation in my own area. It is not based in my constituency, but the Oleaster suite in Birmingham is an excellent example of collaboration between the police, the local authority and the NHS to provide a non-custodial place of safety, and many of the people who go there are young people in distress. Therefore, the hon. Gentleman is right to remind us that so many of the children caught up in the policing system are often not only vulnerable, but suffer from mental health problems, so it is right that we assert that a police cell is no place for young people who are suffering from mental illness.

We welcome the work that is already being done to improve practice across the country. Greater Manchester has been particularly exemplary in its approach. There are many examples I could give, but I will give just one: 17 police constables have had comprehensive mental health awareness training to become crisis intervention officers. The police in the region have also had success with their triage arrangements. Elsewhere—for example, in Nottingham and Derby—I have seen really good examples of the police themselves learning lessons and working in collaboration with other agencies on how those going through trauma in their life should best be supported.

Next, there is the point about good practice. As I have said, the report is balanced, because—I stress this again—it is challenging but also reflects much good practice and urges that that good practice be generalised throughout the police service. I say again that the report is right to identify failures and shortcomings, but also right to celebrate admirable behaviour and practice.

I have seen examples in my own constituency. I remember launching—quite literally—in a shaky canoe on Brookvale park a club run by Sergeant Simon Hensley, which was ultimately joined by a couple of hundred young people locally. Again, there was an incredulous councillor who said, “What’s a canoeing club got to do with police?” As a consequence of that initiative, young people came to have a different relationship with the police. They had a laugh with the police, canoed with the police and—depending on their age, of course—would go and have a drink with the police. In turn, the police were able to identify young people with particular problems in their lives and signpost them towards other routes they could take.

Classically, the role of neighbourhood policing has been not only to detect and fight crime, but to prevent it from occurring in the first place, and that initiative was highly successful. Also, when there was an outbreak of burglaries locally, young people in particular worked with the police to identify the wrongdoers. It is absolutely right that such good practice is showcased and promoted to show what is possible and what works.

The report is right to say that what we have to do at every level—from Government downwards, and at the level of the police service itself—is not only to showcase such examples of positive engagement but to drive that engagement in the next stages. The hon. Gentleman told us the story of some of the initiatives in Sussex. We strongly support the all-party group’s recommendation that there should be a lead for young people in each force.

The hon. Gentleman mentioned youth services and said that local authorities are now under financial pressure. Of course, it is not just youth services that are affected, but the police themselves. Other agencies are crucial to policing. The relationship of the police with young people is particularly important. Therefore, the hon. Gentleman is right to mention the mounting pressures on youth services. I gave the example earlier of police and youth services intervening in a situation before it became a problem, and thereby solving it.

I am bound to say that 17,000 police officers have gone and 32,000 will have gone by the general election. With the thin blue line stretched ever thinner, not only are the public seeing fewer bobbies on the beat—neighbourhood policing in many areas has been hollowed out—but there is potential for a lasting impact on relationships between children and the police. If we believe in the kind of neighbourhood engagement demonstrated in the report—I strongly support it—neighbourhood officers who are able to undertake that engagement are needed.

The report rightly highlights the work in local schools. In another example from my constituency, when the current North Birmingham academy was called College High, five or six years ago, parents were queuing up not to send their kids to the school, which was riven by gang warfare. A highly successful collaboration was instituted between the local police and the school, with a particular police officer attached to it for three years, although not for the whole time. There was an intimate relationship between the police and the school and, progressively, the culture of the school changed dramatically. The head said to me, “It was almost like there was a red mist on the path leading into the school. Whatever problems may have been in the community, they no longer came into the school.” But it is more than that. She said, “Because of how the police engaged with those young people, when going back into the communities from which they came, they had a very different perception of the police.”

Inevitably, the rapidly reducing number of police officers has an impact in terms of the necessary work that they have to do.

[Tim Loughton]

I should have mentioned earlier that, when filming a Channel 4 programme, “Tower Block of Commons”, with other hon. Members a few years ago—I was in Birmingham—eventually the police came along and played a football match against some of the young people I was working with. The hon. Gentleman might like to try the same in his part of Birmingham.

Can I try to tempt the hon. Gentleman away from being slightly partisan on this? This week the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, giving evidence to the Home Affairs Committee, confirmed that the number of police officers in London, which had been at 32,000, had dropped to 30,000, but that within the next few weeks the number will have returned to over 32,000. The police force has saved £600 million in the process. So police numbers are on the rise in many parts of the country, but the police will have made considerable savings and will also have prioritised projects, such as some of those involving working with young people, which I have already mentioned.

[Jack Dromey]

In the spirit of the all-party group’s work, I am striving not to be overtly partisan, but I hope the hon. Gentleman will forgive me; I had to make the point. It is not just about resource, but if one is to achieve the type of engagements that are necessary, which are described in the report, resource is important. He said, in the context of youth services, that there can be false economies. That is right. What are the medium-term consequences? One must have regard to the avoidance of false economies. Incidentally, on getting it right and sensible economies, if we reduced youth reoffending by 10%, it would save £1 billion but, more than that, the pain often suffered by the victims of crime carried out by young people would be avoided. Therefore, neighbourhood policing is crucial in respect of everything said in the report about the importance of local engagement.

In conclusion—this relates to the point I just made to the hon. Gentleman—resource is important, but it is never enough. What is so good about the report is that it celebrates much that is good and it is profoundly challenging at every level, including in arguing for continuing and fundamental culture change regarding the interrelationship between the police and young people. He mentioned the role that the College of Policing plays in inculcating good practice in all police officers and in communicating to them the problems attached to seeing young people as the problem. The report is an excellent piece of work. I congratulate all those involved in its production. I strongly suspect that there will be a warm cross-party welcome for the proposals.

14:28

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Karen Bradley)]

It is an absolute pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Brooke. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton) on securing this debate and bringing this important matter to the House. I congratulate the members of his all-party group, of which you are an esteemed member, Mrs Brooke, as is the noble Baroness Massey, among others. The report “It’s all about trust” is a comprehensive, extensive and thorough piece of work that shows what all-party groups can achieve when their members get together to do incredibly detailed and thorough work.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Norman Baker), then Minister for Crime Prevention, attended the launch of the report. His successor, my right hon. Friend the Member for Hornsey and Wood Green (Lynne Featherstone), gave the Government’s response to the noble Baroness Massey on 14 November last year.

Young people may come into contact with the police for various reasons and it is crucial that, when they do, police treat them in a way that is appropriate to their age and status as children. The police have a statutory duty to safeguard and promote the welfare of children and they must take it very seriously. My hon. Friend made interesting points about early familiarity and getting to know the police, and about not being fearful and there not being a “them and us” situation. He makes exactly the right points. The report is informative about such ideas, and I will mention my thoughts about how those can be achieved.

My hon. Friend also said that children are often treated as mini-adults. We are in a strange world for children and young people. They grow up so quickly: the age of sexual maturity is being reached at an ever younger age, but the age of emotional maturity is not coming down. There are children who are sexually mature, but not emotionally mature. There is a temptation to treat children as adults.

As a mum, I often want to treat my children as mini-adults and expect them to behave as mini-adults, but I have to remember that they are children. Children behave in ways that adults would not, and they do things that an adult simply would not do. A child’s relationship with certain individuals can mean that those people appear almost parental. Those in authority—particularly the police—have to remember that their relationship with a child is a distorted one compared with their relationship with adults.

My hon. Friend talked about the use of stop-and-search on under-18s, as did the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey). I am proud of the steps taken by the Home Secretary with regard to stop-and-search across the board. The Government are clear that powers of stop-and-search, when used correctly, are vital in the fight against crime. Regardless of age, the powers must be applied fairly and only when needed. No one should be stopped on the basis of their race, ethnicity or age.

My hon. Friend mentioned different outcomes in various forces, some of which are clearly better than others. He also talked about the police and crime commissioner in his constituency, Katy Bourne, who was the first evidence giver in the report’s evidence sessions. Clearly, good work is being done in Sussex. He is right: we should all learn from that and ensure that all forces take on board such good work. All forces can learn. There is always more that can be learned, even for those that are exemplary at the moment.

In summer 2013, the Government launched a broad public consultation on the use of stop-and-search powers, following which the Home Secretary announced a comprehensive package of reforms. The measures are designed to ensure that the powers are used lawfully and proportionately and in a targeted and intelligence-led way.

An important announcement was the best use of stop-and-search scheme, to which all 43 forces in England and Wales and the British Transport police have voluntarily signed up. The scheme introduces public scrutiny and ensures that the police collect and publish thorough data on the outcomes of stop-and-searches. Additionally, the Government have revised Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984 code of practice A to provide clarity to police officers on what “reasonable grounds for suspicion” means.

There is no doubt that the Government’s reforms will impact positively on all sections of society, including children. To support all that work, the Government commissioned the College of Policing to review the national training on stop-and-search for all officer ranks. It is undertaking that review with the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and we have specifically asked that the college consider children as part of it.

On young people in custody, children who come into contact with the police are afforded important safeguards by virtue of section 11 of the Children Act 2004. It places the police under an obligation to make arrangements to safeguard and promote the welfare of children when exercising their functions. Additionally, the 1984 Act provides a clear legal framework for all interactions in police custody, and there are special provisions for children and young people.

In the past 18 months, two significant legal changes to the PACE codes of practice have impacted specifically on children and young people. The first was an amendment to code G to ensure that police officers ascertain whether when adults are arrested it is also necessary to arrest a child and bring them into custody. The second change was that, following the Hughes Cousins-Chang judicial review in April 2013, the Government amended PACE codes of practice C and H to give 17-year-olds the same safeguards in police custody as children aged 10 to 16. Specifically, that concerned the provision of an appropriate adult and the provision for the police to inform the child’s parent or legal guardian of their detention.

I feel particularly strongly about that because of the work we are doing with the modern slavery strategy and the Modern Slavery Bill. We have seen significant evidence that child victims of trafficking need additional support. We are trialling child trafficking advocates with the assistance of Barnado’s. I hope the evidence from that trial will enable us to introduce those advocates across the country in the near future specifically for child victims of trafficking. Obviously, the learning and evidence we receive from that trial will assist in all children-in-custody issues.

My hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham talked about the identification of victims, an issue that appears across the board in so many areas of safeguarding and vulnerable people. Often, the first time the authorities will find out that someone is a victim, whether that is of slavery, child sexual abuse or other forms of abuse, is when they come into contact with the police through a custody sergeant. They often will have been arrested for committing crimes that they were forced to do as a result of their circumstances. We need to make it a matter of course that the police and in particular those first points of contact identify victims, spot the signs and do not treat them as criminals. By getting in at the earliest possible opportunity, we will ensure that children are not criminalised when they should not be and be able to give them the support they need and find the genuine criminals. I feel strongly that we need to ensure that all police officers are trained in victim identification.

My hon. Friend talked about 17-year-olds. We discussed that issue in the Modern Slavery Bill, which refers to those “under 18”, and the Serious Crime Act 2015, where we looked at how various provisions affected 16 and 17-year-olds. The Government have recognised that there continue to be some ways in which 17-year-olds are treated as adults in the 1984 Act. For that reason, the Government launched a review of the provisions, and it reported to the Home Secretary in October. It recommended that all provisions in the legislation that treat 17-year-olds as adults should be amended. The Government are clearly committed to making that change.

Another recent change we made was in the Serious Crime Bill, which I am pleased to say became an Act this month. That change was to remove the term “child prostitution” from legislation, which was an incredibly important step. It could be called symbolic, but it is more than that, because it says that children cannot choose to enter into a life of prostitution. Children never choose to be prostitutes; they are always the victims. I am pleased that we could make that change through the 2015 Act.

The most significant provision of PACE concerning the overnight detention in police custody of 17-year-olds has been amended. The Government seized an opportunity in the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015 to ensure that the requirement to transfer children to local authority accommodation will now also apply to 17-year-olds who have been charged and denied bail. In addition, just this week Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary published its thematic inspection of the treatment by the police of vulnerable people in custody. The report covers the treatment of children and some of its findings are extremely concerning. It is hard-hitting in its call for improvements, particularly on the unnecessary overnight detention of children in police custody. The Government welcome the report and are carefully considering its findings.

The police play a crucial role in safeguarding children and young people from abuse. As well as their duty to investigate criminal offences, the police have emergency powers, for example, to enter premises and ensure they can provide immediate protection for children believed to be suffering, or likely to suffer, significant harm. Officers work with a number of partners in protecting children, including community safety partnerships, drug action teams, the multi-agency risk assessment conference and the multi-agency public protection arrangements. They have a duty to share information with other organisations, if that is necessary to protect children. Shared offices and such models as the multi-agency safeguarding hub are designed to encourage partnership working and the exchange of information needed to protect children and the public.

The police have an important role in protecting missing children. Children and young people make up approximately two thirds of missing reports in the UK. Although the vast majority of people who go missing return or are quickly found, many vulnerable children and adults suffer harm and exploitation while missing. Some never return. Identifying and ensuring the safest return possible for those vulnerable children and adults is a key part of the police service’s child protection and wider safeguarding roles. Protecting those at risk of abuse and exploitation is a key priority for the Government, and we work closely with the police to deliver the aims of the cross-Government missing children and adults strategy. The strategy highlights the issue’s importance and provides a core framework for local areas to consider whether they can and should do more to protect children and vulnerable adults who go missing. It requires a range of local and national partners, including the Government, to contribute to the prevention, protection and provision of support for missing persons and their families.

Every effort must be made to prevent looked-after children from being drawn unnecessarily into the youth justice system. Where the police come into contact with looked-after children who may have committed an offence, they have a range of powers that enable them to exercise discretion on the necessary response. Such approaches as community resolution may allow them to resolve the situation without children being charged over relatively trivial incidents.

I was struck by Members’ contributions on antisocial behaviour. My father is a pub landlord, and he was the chair of the local pubwatch. They had problems with kids playing football in one of the car parks, and all the residents were complaining. My dad said, “Why do the police not pick a ball up and play football with them? Why are they trying to arrest them? These are kids. They are not doing anything wrong. They are playing.”

I visited a slavery safe house recently that backs on to a primary school. I asked, “Do you have a problem with the school? Is the school nervous about the fact that you have people in here who have been through some of the most horrendous experiences?” They said, “No, the school is very understanding. There is nothing more wonderful for those victims than hearing the laughter of schoolchildren playing at lunch time. To hear those children out at break time, kicking a football, playing and laughing—those joyous noises make such a difference for those victims.” I will suggest the Midnight Football idea to my local police.

I want to mention the street pastors. I am sure many of us have them in our constituencies. I went to join the Leek street pastors a while ago, on the night the Christmas lights were being switched on. Lots of young people were around. The street pastors were fantastic. They have many weapons in their arsenal, but my favourite were the lollipops. They would go around near the bus station and places where young people might be hanging around—possibly looking like they were about to cause trouble, if one wanted to see it that way—and hand out lollipops. It turns out that, particularly when any sort of tension or aggression starts, the lollipops act like dummies. People suck away on them and the sugar rush gets a bit of sobriety into their bloodstreams, should they be slightly older and therefore allowed to drink, and they all calm down. They suck away like a child sucking on a dummy, and all the aggression goes. It was fantastic, so I recommend lollipops as a very good approach.

The Government take domestic violence and abuse extremely seriously and recognise that young people can be victims in both the home and their relationships. We are continuing to work with victims groups and other Government Departments to raise awareness and signpost where to seek help, which is why, in March 2013, we extended the definition of domestic violence and abuse to include 16 and 17-year-olds, with additional wording to capture coercive control.

The Government deplore the sexual abuse and exploitation of children and will not tolerate at any level failure to prevent harm, support victims and bring offenders to justice. We must protect children from sexual exploitation so that we never again have another case like those in Oxford, Rochdale or Rotherham, where local authorities and the police failed the children whom they had a duty to safeguard. The police have already taken action. For example, all chief constables have committed to a policing action plan that aims to raise the standards in tackling child sexual exploitation. Police and crime commissioners also have a clear role in holding chief constables to account. Nevertheless, the Government are clear that more can and should be done to protect children from sexual abuse.

There are three key challenges for the police. First, to improve the quality of their child sexual abuse investigations in order to bring offenders to justice. Secondly, to improve the identification of victims and survivors, including victims of organised offending, which we discussed earlier, so that they can better target offenders and protect those at risk of further abuse. Finally, the police must improve the support that they provide to victims during investigations. That means that they must focus on the credibility of the allegation, not the victim and their behaviour; they must work together with local agencies, particularly social services, and better share information to ensure that victims and offenders do not slip through the net; and they must work together with the National Crime Agency and other police forces to better identify organised child sexual abuse.

On 3 March, in our report on tackling child sexual exploitation, the Government set out a number of actions to support the police and local agencies to address the challenges that they face. Those actions include: giving child sexual abuse the status of a national threat in the strategic policing requirement; funding a new network of regional police co-ordinators, located in regional organised crime units, who will help to better identify organised child sexual abuse across police force boundaries and ensure that cases are tasked appropriately; and setting up a new centre of expertise to combat child sexual exploitation. All that will help the police and other agencies to understand national data and evidence and the front-line practice and models of integrated working that work best.

Preventing and disrupting offending must be a priority for the police. That is why, on 8 March, the Government commenced new powers, including sexual harm prevention orders and sexual risk orders, which the police can apply for where an individual poses a risk of sexual harm in the UK or abroad, and powers to close an establishment that might be used for sexual activity with a child. Finally, the National Crime Agency has a key role to play in tackling these disgusting crimes. Through the national tasking process, it leads work to identify those individuals and organised groups of offenders who pose the greatest risk to children, and agree a comprehensive, targeted response.

Clearly, this is not a simple matter; if it was, we would have dealt with it years ago. The report from my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham and the all-party group makes for compelling reading and sets out some excellent recommendations. He has worked so hard, both with the all-party group and when he was a Minister, to raise awareness of this incredibly important issue. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend and his all-party group, and I pay tribute to this debate.

14:54

[Tim Loughton]

With the leave of the House, I would say that we have had a good debate, but in my case it was a 45-minute uninterrupted soliloquy, which is a first in my 18 years in the House. I am pleased and grateful that we have had the opportunity to air the really good points from our inquiry, which were published in the report. There was a good degree of consensus from both Front Benchers that we need to recognise these issues, which we can and must take up and progress for the good of our children and the good of policing in this country.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for Birmingham, Erdington (Jack Dromey), and strongly recommend that he organise some football in his part of Birmingham —either at midnight or another time of day—and get the police involved. Members can be part of the solution, working with children and the police.

My hon. Friend the Minister mentioned street pastors: I have been out with my local street pastors and police, and I shall be going out with the police again in a couple of weeks to see their new triage system, which includes a mental health nurse. The last time I went out with the police in Worthing, before Christmas, far from it being young people causing problems, those causing the most antisocial behaviour were the off-duty members of the police force having their Christmas dinners in various establishments around the town. In many cases, young people can give advice to police officers as well.

I urge the Minister to disseminate the good practice that the report flags up, particularly the really good initiatives in Sussex resulting from the energy, enthusiasm and good services of our police and crime commissioner. It also helps that we now have a really good chief constable, something with which we have not previously been blessed in Sussex.

My hon. Friend was absolutely right when she reinforced the importance of early familiarity. If we can get it right in the early stages and recreate the much more friendly, natural, empathetic relationship that school kids had with the police in my time at school—the same is probably true for other Members—when we naturally trusted the police, we will have a far better chance to avoid children falling into greater crimes and child sexualisation. We might also be able to avoid the more recent problem of radicalisation, because the police could share the intelligence gained from working with children to keep them on the straight and narrow.

I am grateful to all Members who have taken part in this exercise—it was not so much a debate—and urge others who have not attended to read the report and take it back to their own local police forces. Along with local authorities, their local forces must do their utmost to ensure that policing is fit for purpose and has the sensitivities and sensibilities required for dealing with vulnerable groups of young people. It is a false economy not to do that.

I am grateful for the opportunity to reinforce those points. I hope that, beyond this Chamber, a wider audience has taken note of our work. The all-party group’s report is one of the best examples of how, through cross-party, consensual work with experts, the House can produce really decent research that will benefit us all.

[Annette Brooke (in the Chair)]

Thank you very much, Mr Loughton, and to all the contributors to that debate. Officially, we must keep going and move on to the next debate, but we are going to try to accommodate a large number of young people in the Public Gallery, so it would be sensible if Members waited a moment while we try to get people in.

Violence against Women and Girls

Thursday 12th March 2015 Westminster Hall

[Mr Peter Bone in the Chair]

15:00

[Pauline Latham (Mid Derbyshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone.

In the week of international women’s day, I express my gratitude to my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod) for securing this important debate on violence against women.

Gender-based violence is a serious bar to development. As a member of the Select Committee on International Development, I have seen how it can affect women overseas. In 2013, a UK study estimated the annual global cost of domestic violence at $42 billion, as a result of lost productivity at work and other expenses such as medical bills, police support and counselling. It is therefore abundantly clear that eradicating gender-based violence goes hand in hand with ensuring economic stability in developing countries—[Interruption.] At this point I break, the Minister having returned to her place, to wish her a happy birthday.

To continue, early and forced marriage also limit girls’ access to education, which has an effect on the quality of the economic contribution that they will ever be able to make. I am pleased that violence against women and girls has been a focus of the Department for International Development’s policy programme and, in a recent update to the International Development Committee, the Department reported a substantial 40% increase in the number of programmes that work to change harmful social norms. In Ethiopia, for example, we have seen that it is not enough to pressure Governments to impose laws on violence against women and girls; there needs to be a shift in culture, which is best supported by educating men and boys as well as women and girls.

[Maria Miller (Basingstoke) (Con)]

I echo my hon. Friend’s thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod).

Does my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham) share my concern that so much of the increase in violence against women is being channelled through social media and websites? Will she join me in congratulating the Government on recognising that and on some of their work such as making revenge pornography illegal, and in urging them to go further to ensure that crimes against women are not committed so easily online?

[Pauline Latham]

The bullying of or violence against woman and girls is not always physical; a lot of the stuff on social media now is verbal and mental bullying, which girls find difficult to resist, in particular during their teenage years when they might sometimes be having difficulty in coming to terms with their life, lifestyle and where they are going. Social media need to be curbed and we need to look hard at how they are used. I am pleased to see that the Government are involved in dealing with the problem.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

I, too, echo the thanks to the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod) for securing the debate.

Will the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham) join me in welcoming the Secretary of State for Education’s announcement that lessons on consent, whether in sex and relationships education or personal, social, health and economic education, are hugely important? Does the hon. Lady share my disappointment that the Secretary of State fell short of saying that such lessons ought to be mandatory in all our schools?

[Pauline Latham]

I welcome the fact that the subject of consent can be included in such lessons. That is down to the school, and I am sure that most schools will include it, as well as education about female genital mutilation and all the other things that women and girls have to put up with. The schools—head teachers and governors—should take the lead, but I welcome the fact that the opportunity to include consent is available to them.

Since I came to Parliament in 2010, I have been particularly interested in FGM and involved in working against it. I am now chair of the all-party group on female genital mutilation. I pay tribute to the Under-Secretary of State for Health, my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison), for all her work before she became public health Minister—a portfolio that includes responsibility for FGM—when she campaigned against FGM alongside some powerful women in this country. Sadly, however, last year we lost a great and tenacious campaigner, Efua Dorkenoo, who died unexpectedly. The FGM movement has a lot to thank Efua and her tireless campaigning for. It is sad that she will not see the fruits of her hard work over many years.

The problem with FGM is that it is on the rise in this country. Only a decade ago the number of girls and women who had undergone FGM in England and Wales stood at approximately 66,000. Shockingly, the figure is now estimated to have more than doubled. I have seen the devastating effect that the practice can have on young women and girls, and I am fully behind any attempt to eradicate it within or outside the UK.

Recently, I worked alongside my hon. Friend the Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) and the Justice for Victims of FGM UK charity to make amendments to what is now the Serious Crime Act 2015 to safeguard girls from the risk of FGM.

[Stephen Metcalfe (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Con)]

I am listening carefully to what my hon. Friend is saying. She said that the incidence of FGM has more than doubled in the UK over the past decade. Is she therefore, like me, disappointed that we have not seen the same increase in prosecutions for the promotion and practice of FGM?

[Pauline Latham]

I certainly am. I hope that under the new Act we will see some serious prosecutions, because there have been problems with earlier ones. I want to see prosecutions that might show the way, so that people who want to carry out FGM of young girls will be persuaded that it is not a good idea because they will be prosecuted. Until that happens, we will continue to see not so much an increase, but probably a steady number of girls who are at risk or have had FGM done to them.

[Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that it is good that people are now talking about FGM? There is much more understanding of it and more support for victims, such as from the Kaiza project in my constituency. I met with those working on the project only a couple of weeks ago and it is drawing attention to the problem and encouraging young women to come forward and confront what has happened to them.

[Pauline Latham]

I certainly agree. Any project such as the one in Rugby is welcome, because we want more organisations to educate and to help people to come forward and talk about FGM, which has been a taboo subject—something done behind closed doors—with families closing up and not talking about it. Girls have suffered as a result. I welcome anything that any organisation, such as the one in my hon. Friend’s constituency, can do.

I also welcome the fact that we have some men in the debate. The subject is not women only and we should recognise that we need men to engage with it. I am pleased that in this place we seem to have a lot of men who are concerned about violence against women in this country and abroad.

[Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Lady is being generous in taking interventions. I thank her for making a powerful speech and for her work on the APG.

The Opposition supported the amendment that the hon. Lady tabled to the Serious Crime Bill to ensure that girls at risk were supported in relation to FGM protection orders. Does she recognise, however, the importance of making FGM an offence? That has been supported by a large number of campaigning groups, and the Labour party tabled an amendment on the issue in Committee. Taking action would mean that, in communities where there were pressures on parents to cut their daughters, action could be taken against those involved.

[Pauline Latham]

Yes, but FGM has been illegal in this country for many years; it is just that we have had no prosecutions. Those are the one thing that will reduce the incidence of FGM. We need to look much more at how France has had successful prosecutions, so that we can have some here. That will show the country, and the world, that we are serious about combating FGM.

One of the amendments I mentioned was designed to give judges explicit guidance to allow them to grant FGM protection orders for girls at risk of FGM. Such orders would stop an at-risk girl leaving the country and prevent the commissioning of an FGM offence. Those offences do not always happen in this country; they can happen when girls go abroad, to places such as Ethiopia, and they often happen when girls go away during the summer holidays. We need to stop that, and education is the only way we can do it.

The amendment would also have provided a concrete framework for social workers, law enforcement agencies and other bodies to operate in. We know from previous experience that non-statutory guidance simply would not provide enough support for workers concerned about a girl at risk of FGM. That lack of direction, coupled with a fear of offending culture and tradition, as well as confusion as to what protective measures are appropriate, has more often than not resulted in a failure to put in place the appropriate safeguarding mechanisms. It is not acceptable to let more girls slip through the net, and I implore the next Government to provide the support that the judiciary and health care professionals need. Cutting is not cultural, and it is not something we accept in this country—it is child abuse. We need to recognise that these girls are at risk of child abuse.

[Stephen Metcalfe]

We cannot say often enough that cutting is not culturally acceptable. We must never use cultural sensitivity as an excuse for not acting when we think people are at risk or have been abused.

[Pauline Latham]

I completely agree. This is quite simply child abuse, and there is no more to be said about it. Everybody has a responsibility to ensure that we do not accept cutting in any form, because it is wrong and it is child abuse.

Forced marriage is another issue affecting women and girls in this country, and the steps the Government took in passing the Anti-social Behaviour, Crime and Policing Act 2014 to identify it as an act of violence and as a crime are admirable. The forced marriage unit, established in 2005, has been instrumental in offering young men and women the help they need if they are at risk of forced marriage. Happily, there have been reports of an increase in the number of people coming forward to the unit, and I hope that trend continues. In the coming years, I believe the UK will see a significant drop in the number of women affected by forced marriage, with the new law serving as a strong deterrent, and education helping girls and men to understand that forced marriage is wrong.

I am particularly proud of the incredible work the charity Karma Nirvana does to combat honour-based violence, including forced marriages, although I do not agree that this violence is honour based—it is violence. The charity runs the UK’s only helpline offering support and advice to those affected by those issues. Its founder, Jasvinder Sanghera, is originally from Derby, and she would have undergone a forced marriage herself had she not run away.

Earlier this year, the charity ran a petition on introducing a day of remembrance for those who have lost their lives in so-called honour-based killings—they are actually murder—as a result of refusing to enter into an arranged marriage. The petition proved incredibly popular, and it contained the signatures of more than 110,000 supporters when it was presented in November. I am pleased to say that the day of remembrance received cross-party support and was given the go-ahead for 14 July, which coincides with the birthday of Shafilea Ahmed, a young girl who was murdered by her parents in 2003 because she refused to have an arranged marriage. Sadly, Jasvinder’s own sister committed suicide by pouring petrol over herself and setting herself alight because she was the unhappy victim of a forced marriage.

I hope that, on 14 July, we will remember not just those who have been murdered as a result of forced marriage, but those who have committed suicide.

In the global arena, positive steps have been taken to prevent FGM, and Ethiopia, for example, outlawed it in 2004. However, the number of women affected by FGM has remained relatively high. The procedures take place in unsterilised and poorly lit conditions, which increases the risk of post-operative infection and further mutilation, and girls can lose their lives as a result.

I am encouraged, however, by the Department for International Development’s response to the situation, because supporting those in the community, such as church leaders, village elders, fathers, sons, mothers and daughters, to speak out against FGM helps to challenge ideas about the practice. I have seen the Department’s programme, and it is having positive results, which I am really pleased about.

On violence against women in Nepal, the police have a very robust system. A feisty female police officer is helping women and girls and challenging attitudes. She helps women to come forward to explain what has been going on. That, again, is an important step forward.

I pay tribute to the Government for all the hard work they have done to improve the lives of women here and overseas, but there is much more to be done, and it is important in the final days of this Parliament that we do all we can to ensure that the good work continues. I hope that the Government, in their aid programmes, continue to recognise women as making a significant economic contribution to their communities and to educate men and boys to change traditional views on women and women’s place in society.

[Chi Onwurah (Newcastle upon Tyne Central) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Lady for her excellent, wide-ranging speech, which addresses many issues that are so important to women and men across the world.

As the hon. Lady says, FGM should not be seen as a cultural practice, but does she agree that it is also important to say that FGM, the exploitation of women and violence against women are not associated with one religion or culture? Those who try to incite division in our community by implying that should be told very clearly that this is, unfortunately, a very broad-based challenge.

[Pauline Latham]

I agree with the hon. Lady—it is broad based. As she says, it has nothing to do with religion and culture; it goes across a number of societies, and it is completely wrong—it is mutilation and violence, and it has no place in modern society.

I am hopeful that the statutory framework put in place to protect girls in this country will yield positive results in eradicating the scourge of FGM and forced marriage.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Peter Bone (in the Chair)]

Order. It might help Members to know that a Division is expected shortly. When it happens, we will suspend for 15 minutes, but we will add on the time that is lost. I intend to call first those who have notified the Chair that they wish to speak.

15:19

[Katy Clark (North Ayrshire and Arran) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to take part in the debate. I missed the opening remarks of the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham) because I was bringing in one of the young women who is attending the event organised for those in their final year of school. I was going to call them sixth formers, but that is not a term we use in Scotland.

The debate is an important one for the week of international women’s day. Violence against women and girls is an international issue. It is estimated that internationally about a third of women and girls experience such violence, but the issue is unfortunately alive and kicking in all parts and communities of the United Kingdom, across all classes. Women and girls of all backgrounds can be affected, at any stage of life. I am grateful for the opportunity to say a few words and want to focus in particular on some issues from North Ayrshire and Arran, which has some of the worst domestic violence statistics in Scotland. That does not necessarily mean there is more domestic violence there than in other areas of Scotland; we do not know. However, more crimes are reported there than in many parts of Scotland.

The issues that I want to focus on are within the power of government. Many services and support mechanisms available to women and girls have been under threat in recent years, as there have been budget cuts from all parts of government—Westminster, the Scottish Parliament and local government. Unfortunately, as often happens when public finances are squeezed, some of the services that are less fashionable or that were developed for the most vulnerable are the first to be attacked. That is happening to services that were developed over decades for women and girls who are subjected to violence and abuse. North Ayrshire is not immune to that effect.

I want to discuss the future of North Ayrshire Women’s Aid. Like Women’s Aid throughout the country, the service was set up by women concerned about the issue, with an ethos very different from that of many services in the voluntary and public sectors. It had the aim of providing support to people in difficult situations and was a women-led service.

[Tim Loughton (East Worthing and Shoreham) (Con)]

I am glad that the hon. Lady has brought the debate to the subject of violence in this country, important though it is to consider the matters that have been covered so far. I do not know whether she has read the “Building Great Britons” report produced a couple of weeks ago by the all-party group on conception to age two. We gave the cost of getting things wrong with respect to perinatal mental health and maltreatment of children as £23 billion. Interestingly, about three quarters of child safeguarding cases are from homes where there is domestic violence. Often, women who suffer perinatal mental health problems and parent their children badly have themselves been victims, coming from parental homes where there was domestic violence. The matter is generational. Does the hon. Lady acknowledge that we need to do much more to make kids safe from domestic violence—not just the women who are in the front line of it?

[Katy Clark]

The hon. Gentleman makes his case powerfully and is of course right that it is difficult to quantify the cost of violence—to the individual and the country. However, there is no doubt that there is a vast cost to the country—millions, and probably billions, of pounds—in consequence of the effect of violence on individuals, whether they suffer it as children or in later life. A great deal of work has been done on the cost to business of people having to take time off as a direct result of physical violence in domestic situations, but, as the hon. Gentleman powerfully expressed, things are far more complicated than that. Government has an interest in addressing the matter, to ensure that all parts of society function as well as they can.

I am particularly concerned that the women’s aid services in North Ayrshire are currently out to tender. There is no guarantee that the service will continue to run as it has in the past if Women’s Aid does not win in the current tendering process.

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

We experienced the same thing in Slough. Berkshire East and South Bucks Women’s Aid did not succeed with its tender; the process was constructed in such a way that it was not possible for it to win. The housing association that won has now withdrawn from providing the service. Berkshire East and South Bucks Women’s Aid has changed its name to Dash, and continues to provide a service using charitable and other funds. Those women will not allow women to continue suffering, and have carried on, but it is shocking that local government, and our tax money, are not backing an effective service. Instead there was investment in a service that turned out to be a paper straw.

[Katy Clark]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend, who has illustrated the point I am attempting to make extremely powerfully.

Even if North Ayrshire Women’s Aid wins the tender, the impact will be a cut of 22% to its budget. My hon. Friend is correct to say that many such services began as voluntary services. Women provided them out of their convictions, in their own time. However, it is practically impossible to provide a service on a purely voluntary basis throughout a local authority area. There is a need for state support. My case is that women-led services may be the most effective among those provided for women and girls in this country. It will be a sad indictment of Members, irrespective of party, if we allow the current budgetary position and the tendering exercises that are happening throughout the service to lead to a situation in which services cannot continue operating in the way that developed over generations.

With a 22% cut in its budget, North Ayrshire Women’s Aid will no longer, if it wins the contract, be able to help with addiction or children’s issues, which are part of its core service at the moment. Workers have already been issued with redundancy notices. A cause for concern is that the tendering process is such that whoever wins the contract will have to operate differently from previously. The council will control opening times and decide the nature of the service provided to women. Historically, the service has been led very much by women. Women have been employed by it and run it, and there is a woman chief executive.

Previously, of course, it was a co-operative operation. However, pressures from the public sector have meant that Women’s Aid could not continue to work in that way, so a male chief executive could be appointed. He might be good at the job, but that does not accord with the ethos in which Women’s Aid developed—of a women-led project, with recognition of the fact that women are often best placed to provide the relevant services to women and children. Things might be different in the context of men suffering domestic abuse, which we have debated previously, but the debate today is about women. The council will decide on recruitment and selection, and there will be a more limited service dealing with housing and shelter, rather than the more holistic approach developed by Women’s Aid over a long time. That is just one example of how services are under threat as a result of budget cuts.

When the previous Administration were in power in Scotland, Women’s Aid budgets were ring-fenced; it was decided that they should be because it was recognised that when times are difficult, services of that kind are the first to go. Services that are there for the most vulnerable do not have big lobbying groups providing them with protection and so they will be the ones to go when times are tough. However, the decision was then taken in Scotland not to ring-fence budgets for such services, and we are now seeing the consequences.

As we debate the effect of these issues on women and girls throughout the world, it is important that we also remember what is going in our own backyards—in our constituencies and communities. We should make sure that we protect the kind of services that are required when women and girls are most vulnerable—the point in their lives when perhaps they are at their lowest and so need support—and that there are the resources, commitment and vision to develop better services in future.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—

[Mr Peter Bone (in the Chair)]

Order. Before I call the next speaker, I should say that when we suspend for the Division that will be, as I said, for 15 minutes, but as there is a lot of public interest in the debate and an overflow of visitors, if hon. Members get back as quickly as possible we will continue straight away. Perhaps during the suspension would be a good time to try to squeeze in a few more chairs.

15:49

[Mary Macleod (Brentford and Isleworth) (Con)]

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting us the debate, as well as my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham) and the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Katy Clark) for helping to secure it. We have already heard about some important aspects of our subject today. The debate is about what we can do, as part of the work of international women’s day, to “make it happen” and to make a difference to lives in this generation and the next.

The statistics on domestic abuse and domestic violence are still horrific. Two women a week in this country still get killed by a partner or former partner, and one call in 10 to emergency services relates to domestic abuse. There is a real reason why we are discussing this subject today: the statistics should not be at those levels. In London, reported incidents of domestic abuse increased by 23% last year, although that is not necessarily to say that the incidence is increasing. However, it is good that women now feel that they can come forward and talk about those issues more, which we should encourage even further.

15:32

Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.

15:45

On resuming—

[Mary Macleod]

We have already heard about female genital mutilation. In my part of west London, there have been about 50 cases of FGM in one of my local hospitals in the past year, which shows the scale of it. Those cases were in the maternity wing, where the women were giving birth. That is definitely something that we need to take account of.

I must pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond (Yorks) (Mr Hague), who, with Angelina Jolie, has been leading the campaign on sexual violence in conflict. It really has raised awareness at an international level, which is important. Domestic abuse is very much a hidden crime that affects every community and all backgrounds in this country and around the world.

I was at an international women’s day event last Friday. One of the speakers, a lawyer, said that she had no knowledge of domestic violence until one day when she heard screams outside her house. She went out to see what was happening, and a man was banging the head of his wife against the roof of a car, so she tried to do something about it. She found out later that he was banging his wife’s head against the car because she had bought a new pair of shoes that day. It was absolutely ridiculous. That was a visible sign of abuse, but so much happens behind closed doors and we do not see it. That is why it is important to encourage people to speak out about it. It affects men and women, and it is important to encourage victims to speak out and get the support that they need.

We have taken some steps forward in this Parliament. We have had £40 million of stable ring-fenced funding for specialist domestic and sexual violence support services, and the Home Secretary recently announced £10 million to support refuges, which was great. She came to the London domestic abuse summit, held in Chiswick in west London. The very first refuge in the world for women was in Chiswick. I wanted to show that London was responding to the problem and that we were a core part of finding a solution.

We have also widened the definition of domestic abuse, as the Minister said in the previous debate, so that it also includes the emotional and psychological abuse of 16 and 17-year-olds. We have opened 15 new rape support centres, in addition to the 84 that already existed, and we have increased the prosecution rate to 74.6%. We have introduced Clare’s law—the domestic violence disclosure scheme—and domestic violence protection orders. There has been a rigorous review by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary into the approach by police, which I have chased up with my local police. They say that body-worn cameras are making a real difference on domestic abuse cases. We have also investigated ways to strengthen the law to provide a single offence of domestic violence, and introduced stalking offences as well.

We have issued new guidance for the prosecution of FGM cases, and issued guidance to councils on how to identify domestic abuse quickly. We have signed up to the Council of Europe’s convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, and held the first violence against women and girls global conference. So some things have been done.

I am also trying to work with the Mayor of London’s office; I really want London to be a city with an absolutely zero-tolerance no to domestic abuse. In announcing £5 million in respect of domestic abuse recently, the Mayor said:

“This is a horrendous and frightening crime and all victims should have all the support they need, no matter where they live, which this new service will guarantee. But we’ve also got to get tough on the perpetrators of abuse by making it very clear that domestic violence in any form will not be tolerated and give victims who have the courage to report abuse the support they need to get the justice they deserve.”

That is absolutely right, and that support is critical.

Things can be done on a small scale. One of my local residents in Isleworth, Lesley Miller, recently did an art exhibition in South street to raise money for domestic abuse charities to help to create something positive from this. I have pushed my local council in Hounslow to prioritise victims of domestic abuse on the housing waiting list, especially when they have children, to save them going into temporary housing and then on to other housing, and to try to get them as stable as possible, so that children can get that support.

It was really good to hear the Secretary of State for Education announce the other day that all school pupils will now be taught a curriculum for life. I must pay tribute to my local Youth Parliament member, Dunja Relic, who raised the issue in a recent meeting that the Secretary of State was having in Brentford and talked about the curriculum for life. Only a month later, the Secretary of State has announced that everyone will be taught the curriculum for life, which is about emotional resilience to cope with the modern internet age.

Sexualised images on the internet, bullying and incidents of revenge porn are creating unimaginable pressures for young people, so schools need to do more to help pupils— to help young people—to manage their lives and stay safe. Teachers will be urged to improve sex education lessons and new topics will be drawn up to be covered in personal, social, health and economic education lessons.

[Seema Malhotra]

The hon. Lady is making a powerful speech, and indeed, we have worked in similar ways on those issues in Hounslow. I wonder whether she can clarify something: in my understanding, the announcement made by the Secretary of State for Education is for non-statutory guidance, so it is not clear how many schools will implement it.

[Mary Macleod]

The information from the Secretary of State’s office said that all schoolchildren will be taught it, so that is something that we definitely need to push on and ensure is happening in each of our schools. An important part of that is the dangers of the internet, which are not included. That raises lots of additional issues. The Secretary of State said:

“A good PSHE education should cover all of the skills and knowledge young people need to manage their lives, stay safe, make the right decisions, and thrive as individuals and members of modern society.”

To make progress on the issue, we have to look at the four Ps: prevention; protection and support for victims; prosecution of offenders; and how the policies are integrated. I want to raise three key things, the first of which is people continuing to raise awareness. All of us, including hon. and right hon. Members, as well as young people, can raise awareness of the campaign to get rid of domestic abuse. The “This is abuse” campaign has been really effective in raising awareness—if anyone has not seen “This is abuse”, I urge them to have a look at it. It is supported by “Hollyoaks”.

[Stephen Metcalfe]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. Domestic violence is obviously an important issue and she is highlighting some of the challenges, but public awareness and awareness among those who might be able to influence policy are important. Will she encourage local organisations and local charities to contact their Members of Parliament directly about the work that they are doing? In Basildon, Basildon Women’s Aid contacted me. I have seen the incredible work it is doing, but it took a number of years for it to highlight that to me. Perhaps more interconnection between Members and local charities would help.

[Mary Macleod]

I agree with my hon. Friend. We can also take such things into schools. My right hon. Friend the Member for Richmond (Yorks) and I visited one of my local schools, Chiswick school, for a discussion with 14 to 16-year-olds on sexual violence in conflict and domestic abuse. They were absolutely fascinated. They were brilliant, asked intriguing questions and got engaged with the topic. If we can help to link up all the organisations and people who know a lot about the issue and can offer support, the situation will be all the better.

There is also the use of technology and global social media to consider. We know that technology can be used by perpetrators to commit abuse, and we are battling against the tide of porn online and the impact it has on young people’s views on sex and relationships, but we can also work to use technology as a major part of the solution, not just the problem. The issue has been discussed this week in New York at the UN Commission on the Status of Women, and it will come up with some ideas on how that will be addressed.

Women’s Aid has launched an interactive billboard for international women’s day, with a photo of a female victim of abuse and an invitation to “Look at me”. When passers-by focus on the bruises, their photo appears on the advert and they help to heal the bruises, which is a nice way of doing it. 3M has developed a unique technology to provide victims with an early warning of possible danger. It has been used in Spain, where it has been credited with reducing the number of domestic-related homicides. Body-worn cameras, which I have mentioned, are improving the capturing of evidence by the police. In global campaigning on social media, the Salvation Army is sharing its message about “The Dress” in its campaign.

Furthermore, it is important that we involve men, which is why I am pleased to see my hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock (Stephen Metcalfe) here today. This campaign affects so many people and families in our communities that we all need to work on it together to make a difference. This is not just a women’s issue; in fact, 700,000 men are also victims. That is probably the tip of the iceberg, as many men would not necessarily report abuse.

I return to the role of schools. If we want to change things for this generation and the next, we have to work with young people in schools—boys and girls, young men and young women—to say, “You can help us with this campaign. You can make a difference in your local community. Work with your MP and with the organisations and agencies to spread the word among the next generation so that they understand the warning signs of an abusive relationship and understand what a good relationship is.” Young people can help and support their friends who are going through those problems. They are more likely to see some of the signs, and their friends are more likely to confide in them.

[Stephen Metcalfe]

My hon. Friend has been generous in taking interventions, and I am grateful to her and to all hon. Members who have given way to me. Physical abuse is very serious, but I want to highlight the fact that psychological abuse can be equally serious in its long-term effects. It might not have the immediacy of physical abuse, but in an ongoing situation psychological abuse can leave as many scars as what might be considered ordinary domestic abuse, if there is such a thing.

[Mary Macleod]

My hon. Friend is so right. If someone went into a relationship in which their partner hit them on day one, they would walk out, but they do not hit on day one; they wait for a point months down the line, when the other person is closer to them—loves them, is involved in the relationship and may also have children with them. That is why the situation becomes difficult. It starts with emotional or psychological abuse and often financial abuse—isolating the person and telling them that they are useless—and it just builds from that. Often, the women are dependent on the men and want to try to solve the situation. Then they are told, if there is any violence, that it is their fault anyway.

All the stories are so similar. Every time we speak to a victim, the stories are almost identical in terms of the process undertaken. That is what we need to get across to young people—that this absolutely should not be tolerated. We therefore need to go further in raising awareness, encouraging respect in relationships, using technology and social media where we can and involving both men and women in our efforts. It would be so good if we could use today’s debate, as part of the international women’s day campaign, to make that happen. Let us really make a difference to the lives of not just men and women in our society who are going through domestic abuse, but women across the world, and for not just this generation, but the next.

16:00

[Fiona Mactaggart (Slough) (Lab)]

I want to make three main points. One is that violence against women and girls is serious. I want, secondly, to discuss better ways of preventing it and, thirdly, to raise issues about ensuring that policies and law actually work in practice.

The issue really is serious. I was looking at the statistics for Thames Valley, the police area that covers Slough, which I represent: one third of the assaults with injury, in the latest year for which figures are available, are as a result of domestic abuse—and actually not just assaults with injury are involved. If we look at the homicide figures for the Thames Valley area, we see that in the past five years there have been 86 adult homicides, of which 27 were domestic abuse-related homicides. One in three murders in the Thames Valley police area is domestic abuse-related.

This is a real problem, which is life-threatening for women and girls. We have to start from realising that and recognising that it is not just a question of bringing the perpetrators to justice. This debate has illustrated that very powerfully. It is also a question of preventing these kinds of incident in the future. That is mostly what I want to focus on—the education not just of girls but of wider society in how to protect girls and women from violence.

I held a meeting with women in my constituency about child sexual exploitation. They were concerned about the issue. They felt that policies were being developed “somewhere up there” and their experience, as anxious mums, was not part of the debate and discussion. It was striking that again and again they came back to the issue of education—education not just for their daughters, but for themselves.

One of my asks for the Minister is that every school should have not just education for girls, but PSHE education for mums and dads. That was the demand that came from the meeting in my constituency, and I think it is a brilliant demand, because lots of mums there said that they did not really know what their daughter or son was seeing on the internet. They did not realise that internet safety should mean that they keep the family computer in a room where they can see what is going on. They should not allow their sons to have access to computers in their bedrooms, because if they do, they will be looking at things that mum and dad do not want them to see.

[Pauline Latham]

I arranged an evening in a school to talk about just that. I invited two lots of parents from two very large schools to talk about what was happening. Do you know how many actually came? It was an official meeting at the school, and I had the then Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for East Worthing and Shoreham (Tim Loughton), and child protection people there. Twenty people came, and most of those were teachers. There were probably four or five parents.

[Fiona Mactaggart]

I think that part of the reason for this situation is that we do this education too late. I do not know whether the hon. Lady’s school was a primary or a secondary school, but if we did it in primary schools, with which parents have a more intimate relationship, it is more likely that parents would do it. I think that we should do it in primary schools.

In Slough earlier this week, I talked about this issue at a meeting—a kind of youth question time for parliamentary candidates and their MP. A young woman came up to me and said, “Do you know what? The PSHE I got was much too late. It was when I was in year 10 or 11—something like that. Actually, it’s in year 7 that you are trying to make your first relationships with boyfriends.” I had the impression that she had been a victim of exploitation. She did not say anything that implied that she had been, but the fact that she wanted to take me into a corner and talk to me about this made me feel that she had been vulnerable and had not known what to do about her vulnerability. My anxiety about the welcome announcement from the Secretary of State is that this education will not happen young enough.

I used to teach year 6 in primary school. Some of my colleague teachers—this was a lifetime ago—were frightened of doing sex education, so I tended to be the person who did it, but I think that we have gone past that. It is really important that before girls have boyfriends and develop a sense of their own sexuality, they are able to have these conversations with trusted adults who can advise them on ways to be resilient to exploitation.

[Mary Macleod]

I want to give the right hon. Lady this example. I ran the London domestic abuse summit, in Chiswick, with the Home Secretary. I invited a couple of students from each of my local secondary schools, and some of the schools came back and said, “Sorry, we think it’s inappropriate.” I think that there is some work to be done to educate teachers that this is a very important issue and they have to play their part in it.

[Fiona Mactaggart]

The hon. Lady is right to say that we need to educate teachers. I used to be a teacher educator—a teacher trainer—and it is true that we gallop through so much training for teachers so fast that we do not train them in how to teach this. Primary school teachers in particular can feel anxious about teaching it, but in my view it should be mandatory at every level of a child’s education.

Children should have relationships education from the age of five. At five, children will be talking not about sex and sexuality, but about what to do about bullies and about sharing toys. Those are very important lessons about relating to other people that at the moment schools avoid. Not every school does so, but it is not mandated, as part of the national curriculum, that schools have to teach this, and many parents do not have the confidence to teach it. As a result, we leave our children vulnerable because they do not know how to protect themselves. The best form of protection against exploitation is self-protection. The police cannot be there all the time; mum cannot be there all the time. We need to develop young adults who can keep themselves safe and who know how to resist exploitation.

[Seema Malhotra]

My right hon. Friend is making a very important point in a powerful speech. I was struck by a story that I heard recently about the impact of sex and relationships education in school. A young boy went home after some classes and realised that the domestic abuse—the violence—that he was seeing at home was not normal. He then raised a challenge at home, which led to the mum disclosing the abuse. Given the impact that SRE can have, not just in raising awareness but in making a change, does my right hon. Friend agree that it is right that it should be compulsory and that it can be age-appropriate and safe to teach from the age of five?

[Fiona Mactaggart]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is also right to admit that dealing with such things is complicated for teachers. We need to support and educate teachers. I remember reading a story that a pupil of mine had written; it was obvious to me that she had been watching utterly inappropriate movies at home. I thought that they must have strongly informed her writing, because I did not believe that she could have imagined all the things that she had written about. As quite a young teacher, I did not really know how to respond to that situation. Young teachers will encounter that kind of thing, and we need to train them to deal with it.

Education is one of the keys to prevention, but I believe that there is another way of reducing violence against women and girls. Hon. Members probably know that I regard prostitution, as it actually happens, as usually being a form of violence against women and girls, particularly vulnerable women. I believe that the way to prevent that form of violence is to reduce girls’ vulnerability to being seduced into prostitution.

There has been much greater awareness of child sexual exploitation in debate and discourse recently, and that is an important step, but we need to reduce the number of women who are prostituted. As a state, we need to help women leave prostitution, and we need to deal with the demand for prostitutes. In my view, we should follow the Swedish example and criminalise the customers, who have choice, rather than criminalising the women, who have little.

I praise the Government for creating section 76 of the Serious Crime Act 2015, which makes controlling and coercive behaviour an offence. That offence has the capacity to play a role in the prevention of physical violence, because physical violence is often not the first step; it follows on from, and is bound up with, controlling and coercive behaviour. Will the Minister tell the House the exact steps that she will take to ensure that police forces deliver on that? Earlier in the debate, we heard how for decades we have had legislation against cutting girls’ genitals, but there have been no successful prosecutions. I want to make sure that section 76 of the 2015 Act does not follow that trend, and that it is instead used by police services as an effective way of preventing violence against women and girls.

The hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod) referred to the additional £10 million of support for refuges announced in November 2014. I was glad to see that, but I have to say that, too often, services for women, whether it be Rape Crisis helplines or funding for refuges, are sorted out at the last minute with no time for people to apply. The requirements often mean that, as on this occasion, lots of brilliant services cannot get themselves together to access the money, because they get the rules and regulations too late.

We need to make sure that in the provision of such services, as with other things, women are not seen as an afterthought. It must not be a case of a Department—in this case, I believe it was the Department for Communities and Local Government—saying, “Oh, whoops, we have a £10 million underspend here, and we do not know where it came from. Let’s shush the women by giving it to them.” I suspect that that is what happened, although I might be wrong. That happens too often, and we need to make such services absolutely mainstream. If we protect women and girls, we will reduce violent assaults and cut by a third the number of women who are murdered. We must make sure that that is front and centre of everything we do.

The Minister will speak on Tuesday next week in ping-pong on the Modern Slavery Bill. I believe that the Bill gives us an opportunity to help a number of women who have come to Britain as domestic workers and who have been vilely exploited and hurt. I am glad that the Minister has agreed to take a step in the right direction on the Bill, and I hope that she might turn it into a leap and support the Lords amendment. The Bill offers us another opportunity to support a number of people, mostly women, who have been victims of violence and exploitation. I look forward to the Minister’s response on that.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Karen Bradley)]

I know that the right hon. Lady—she is a passionate advocate on this topic—cannot be here for my closing remarks, so I wanted to comment now. We are drawing up an implementation plan to deal with the domestic abuse offence. Officials from the Home Office have met the national policing lead on domestic abuse and the College of Policing, and they will be meeting the CPS, to work on implementing the offence in such a way as to ensure that it genuinely offers better protection to victims. We have debated the generalities today, but I wanted to make sure that the right hon. Lady knew the specifics before she left.

[Mr Peter Bone (in the Chair)]

Ms Mactaggart, had you concluded your speech?

[Fiona Mactaggart]

I have concluded. I thank the Minister for her comments.

16:16

[Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to speak in the debate. I congratulate the hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod) on securing the debate and thank my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Katy Clark) and the hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham) for their contributions. I want to acknowledge the girls who are shadowing us today. They have given us feedback on the impact that the debate has on them.

Some important points have been raised. The hon. Member for Mid Derbyshire talked about the work that she has done to tackle female genital mutilation. She called for an even stronger prevention strategy, which would include making the encouragement of FGM an offence so that parents know that they will be prosecuted if they put pressure on their daughters to undergo FGM. She raised the huge concern that exists about the poor level of prosecution, and she made the point that cutting is indeed child abuse. I reiterate the point, which she made powerfully, that there is absolutely no cultural excuse for violence against women and girls. We must take a stand against all such violence, whether it be forced marriage, child marriage, FGM or domestic violence. I acknowledge the work done on the matter by Karma Nirvana, Jeena International, the Sharan Project, many FGM campaigners, Women’s Aid, Rape Crisis and others.

My hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran raised concerns about the impact of the Government’s funding cuts on the survival of her local Women’s Aid refuge. Refuges around the country are under threat of closure. That has led Labour to commit to providing a £3 million annual national refuge fund to make sure that that much-needed and life-saving service has the resources that it requires to survive.

The hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth talked about the horrifying statistics on domestic violence, which has increased in London, and described how things that go on behind closed doors are a matter for all of us. My hon. Friend the Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) spoke powerfully about the fact that we need not only a serious justice response to ensure that many more perpetrators are brought to justice for violence against women and girls, but a stronger and more effective prevention strategy. She also stressed the importance of compulsory sex and relationship education.

As Members of Parliament, I am sure that we have all discussed the problem of violence against women and girls in our communities. As I have travelled around the country on the pink bus, I have held discussions with women about issues that they are extremely concerned about. As you may be aware, Mr Bone, 9.1 million women did not vote in the last general election. We want every single one of them to vote this time.

The issues that many local campaigners, victims and survivors of domestic and sexual violence have raised with me bring home that every community is affected. Whether we are rich or poor, and whatever our social or ethnic background, this issue unites us all, which is why it is so important that we talk about it through international women’s day. The solution to so many of these issues can be found only by working across nations and cultures.

I am proud to have been part of the One Billion Rising event co-ordinated by Lynne Franks over the past few weeks. One in three women across the planet will be raped or beaten in her lifetime, which is a staggering statistic—1 billion women will be affected. The hon. Member for Brentford and Isleworth mentioned the women of the world festival, in which I participated last weekend and which explores these issues. Men are also campaigning through initiatives such as the white ribbon campaign against domestic and sexual violence. It is important that men also play their part.

In the past week we have seen “India’s Daughter,” a powerful documentary that sheds light on the appalling rape, suffering and death of Jyoti Singh. The cultural contexts within which that happened truly need to be addressed. As well as shocking India and the world, the documentary highlights the fundamental truth that violence against women and girls is a global issue. We need to support nations, but we also need to work together in this country.

Yesterday, I attended the Women’s Aid and Girlguiding event in Speaker’s house to launch the girls matter campaign, which calls for young girls’ voices to be heard—we must see her, hear her and believe her. The event also highlighted the staggering statistic that one in three young girls are subject to different forms of sexual harassment, even in school. We must ensure that their voices are heard and that they do not continue to suffer in silence.

We have heard the statistics about domestic violence, which is a national scandal. Millions of men and women are affected each year. In some areas, almost one in five 999 calls are related to domestic violence. One in three 16 to 18-year-old girls have experienced groping or unwanted sexual touching in school. Some 750,000 children a year witness domestic violence. Shocking rape statistics have been made public today through the rape monitoring group. The number of recorded rapes in England and Wales has shot up in the past year. Indeed, since 2010 we have seen a 38% increase, but the number of prosecutions has gone down. There has been a staggering 50% increase in the number of recorded rapes in London in the past five years.

We recognise that there is a huge amount to do, but we are extremely concerned about the collective impact of some of the Government’s funding and policy changes, which have been implemented without evaluating their cumulative impact on women’s safety. One example is the scrapping of the welfare assistance fund, which left local authorities struggling to provide women who have left abusive relationships with basic items to start a new life, including bedding, cooking equipment and school shoes. Also, the lack of expertise in commissioning has sometimes led local authorities to ring-fence refuge beds for local women alone, which has had an enormous impact because women sometimes need to flee to areas away from where they live in order to stay safe. We have heard examples of other commissioning arrangements in which the right questions have not been asked and a quality service has not been provided and has subsequently failed. We also know that 43% of domestic violence survivors do not have the prescribed forms of evidence to access legal aid. We cannot have a situation in which women are not able to get justice because they cannot access the support they need. All regions have lost services supporting children living with domestic abuse, with the biggest losses occurring in the south-west, the south-east and the west midlands.

There is still a long way to go. I will say a few words about where there is good cross-party agreement on what needs to be done but where we need to go much further. The previous Labour Government made significant progress in a number of areas. Convictions for rape increased by 45%, and there was a decline in domestic violence. We introduced specialist domestic violence courts, multi-agency risk assessment conferences and independent domestic violence advocates. Many of those measures, including IDVAs, have been continued by this Government and have made an important difference. We have supported the Government’s work to introduce the new offence of domestic abuse. I am pleased to hear about the work to ensure that there is sufficient guidance and that training is implemented, so that there is understanding and awareness of the new offence of domestic abuse and so that that makes a difference to the lives of families across the UK. We pressed for legal aid for FGM protection orders, and I am pleased that the Government have confirmed that that legal aid will be available for girls at risk, but we have also called for the encouragement of FGM to be an offence. We will certainly be looking at that.

If Labour comes to power, we will put women’s safety much more centre stage. We will appoint a new commissioner to address domestic and sexual violence, and we will integrate the protection of women and girls across Government. There will also be new standards for policing. We will publish domestic abuse and sexual violence league tables for every police force across England and Wales to expose poor performance and poor standards.

We will also make sex and relationship education a compulsory part of school curriculums. In the past week there has been another missed opportunity for the Government to do that. Those issues have been raised by hon. Members on both sides of the House, and the Select Committee on Education has made its recommendation on that subject in the past few weeks with cross-party support. The recommendation is supported by girls and young boys to whom I have spoken in a series of girl safety summits across the country.

We need to ensure an understanding of zero tolerance of violence in relationships. People must understand the difference between an abusive relationship and a normal relationship. They must know what rape is. One girl said to me, “Nobody ever taught us what rape was. I had to go on the internet to find out.” To hear such stories from young girls and boys growing up across Britain is a travesty. We need to take our responsibility much more seriously.

Although we welcome the moves by the Secretary of State for Education, it has taken the Government five years to recognise that sex and relationship education guidance needs to mention the internet. We are concerned by the announcement of what we understand to be non-statutory guidance for schools, which is just not good enough. Despite being urged by the Opposition, by charities, by parents, by young people and by the Education Committee, the Government have not taken this opportunity to make sex and relationship education compulsory in schools.

This has been an important and valuable debate. We face a real challenge, and not just in responding to the rising demand for services and support. I have talked to rape crisis centres, and they are dealing with not only historical but new reports and disclosures of rape and sexual assault. Some of that service needs to last a lifetime, and resources must be made available to do that.

The Government must commit to a long-term strategy for the effective prevention of violence against women and girls in all its forms, and we must play our part on the world stage to ensure that that work happens not only here but across the world. We must ensure that women and girls are safe not just in their own homes but wherever they work and wherever they are in society.

16:28

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Karen Bradley)]

I congratulate my hon. Friends the Members for Brentford and Isleworth (Mary Macleod) and for Mid Derbyshire (Pauline Latham) and the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Katy Clark) on securing this debate, and I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting it. The Committee showed great foresight in granting a debate on violence against women and girls, an important subject, on today of all days: we have seen so many young women coming to Parliament to see what we do here and to learn about the debates we have on such important issues that rightly concern us all.

There is no doubt that violence against women and girls ruins lives and has a devastating impact on victims and their families. The Government have taken strong measures to tackle all forms of violence and abuse, including domestic violence, sexual violence, forced marriage, female genital mutilation and stalking. Too many women have been subjected to unacceptable violence. We have heard in contributions to this debate some powerful examples of the sort of violence that women endure, both here and overseas. The Government have been unequivocal that such violence must stop, and I am proud of the progress we have made since 2010 to realise our vision of a society where no woman is subjected to violence and abuse.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire and my right hon. Friend the Member for Basingstoke (Maria Miller) made the point that the issue is wider than raising awareness among women and girls; we need to educate boys and men and ensure that people understand social media. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend for her tireless work on revenge pornography. That is the sort of work and those are the sorts of measure that will make tangible differences for women and girls here in Britain. She should be incredibly proud of what she has achieved.

We have made significant legislative changes since 2010 and ensured that more forms of violence and abuse are explicitly enshrined in law as criminal offences. The Government understand that domestic violence and abuse are more than just physical. To quote one victim who responded to our consultation last summer,

“my bruises faded, but the psychological scars didn’t”.

Last week, the Serious Crime Act 2015 received Royal Assent, and with it we created a new law that will ensure that manipulative, controlling perpetrators who cause their loved ones to live in fear will face justice for their actions. The new law captures coercive and controlling behaviour in intimate or family relationships and is a significant step forward in improving the protection available for victims of this sinister and pervasive form of abuse. The right hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart) asked what approach we would take to ensure that it works on the ground, and in my intervention I specified what action we are taking to make that tangible difference.

Within the same Act, we also introduced a requirement for mandatory reporting of female genital mutilation. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire, who has done such incredible work on that issue. I will say more later about our work on it but in terms of legislative change, it is another significant step forward. We introduced two new offences of stalking in 2012 to reflect properly the seriousness of that insidious crime, and I am pleased that in 2013-14, more than 700 prosecutions were brought under the new legislation. We criminalised forced marriage last year, and the possession of realistic depictions of rape and revenge pornography both became offences under the Criminal Justice and Courts Act 2015.

Protecting those at risk is fundamental to reducing violence. We rolled out the domestic violence protection order and domestic violence disclosure scheme, or Clare’s law, nationally last year. Those innovative measures are about stopping violence in its tracks, and there is clearly a demand for them; more than 2,500 domestic violence protection orders are now in place across England and Wales.

The orders sanction the perpetrators of violence and lay the culpability exactly where it should be. Victims are able to stay in their own homes, as they should be able to, and the perpetrator is the one who must stay away. More than 1,300 disclosures have already been made under the domestic violence disclosure scheme, which allows people to make an informed decision about their relationships. Women are absolutely entitled to know whether the person whom they have met has a violent history and to get out of the relationship before it is too late.

These crimes are often hidden and under-reported, but positive indications are emerging from data sources. I am particularly encouraged to see that the prevalence of sexual assault against women has fallen to its lowest ever level since the data began to be captured in 2004-05. At the same time, the reporting of sexual offences has increased by 19%, showing that more victims have the confidence to come forward. The Office for National Statistics has said clearly that the increase in reporting is due to more victims coming forward and better recording by the police. We must continue to do everything that we can to ensure that the victims of those terrible crimes have the confidence to come forward and that the criminal justice system does all in its power to support them through the difficult journey to justice.

Criminal justice outcomes for violence against women and girls have improved, with rape referrals from the police to the Crown Prosecution Service increasing after swift Government action to tackle a fall-off in referrals last year. In addition, the Director of Public Prosecutions anticipates that the number of rape cases going to trial this year will be about 30% higher than in 2012-13, meaning that there will be about 550 extra jury trials this year and 650 extra decisions to charge.

My hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth made an important point about body-worn cameras. We want them used to ensure that we have appropriate evidence and to make the criminal justice process as painless as possible. For women and girls who have already suffered horrendously at the hands of perpetrators to go through the criminal justice system without the support that we can give them through body-worn cameras is not acceptable.

Prosecutions for domestic abuse have increased. In 2013-14, there were just over 78,000 prosecutions nationally. Current projections estimate that the figure will increase to nearly 90,000 by the end of this financial year—by far the highest number ever—while out-of-court disposals for domestic abuse at the pre-charge stage have reached their lowest levels. “No crime” rates for rape have fallen year on year since 2010. More adult sex offenders are currently in prison—11,119 in 2014, compared with 8,980 in 2010—and the average sentence length has increased from 50 months in 2010 to 60 months in 2013. The number of sexual offenders with multi-agency public protection arrangements charged with a serious further offence has dropped from 162 in 2009-10 to 143. The conviction rate for domestic violence and abuse is also at its highest ever level: almost 75% in 2013-14, up from 72% in 2009-10.

Those figures are encouraging, but as we know, criminal justice and legislation are only one part of the picture when it comes to an effective strategy to tackle violence against women and girls. That is why we have taken a wider-ranging approach in our work—for example, by launching our “Body Confidence” campaign to challenge media representations of women and the highly acclaimed “This Is Abuse” campaign alluded to by my hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth, to encourage teenagers to rethink their views of violence, abuse, controlling behaviour and what consent means within their relationships. Since we first launched the campaign in 2010, the website has had more than 2 million unique visitors to the website, and we have spearheaded groundbreaking awareness campaigns within communities affected by forced marriage and female genital mutilation, which, as numerous contributors have said clearly, is child abuse, with no ifs or buts.

[Seema Malhotra]

The Minister is highlighting the effective work of the “This Is Abuse” campaign. Have the Government any plans to rerun the public campaign to raise awareness through marketing?

[Karen Bradley]

There are a number of plans to ensure continuing awareness. I could not tell the hon. Lady definitively about that specific campaign, but may I write to her on the Government’s plans to ensure that we continue to raise awareness? She is right that we need to keep hitting it home. We cannot let up now; we must ensure that we get the message across.

Ending those terrible forms of child abuse within one generation has been an ambitious vision of this Government. Through our work, public and media awareness of those crimes has rocketed. Our work to tackle FGM is an example of how the UK has provided global leadership on issues of violence against women and girls. My hon. Friend the Member for South Basildon and East Thurrock (Stephen Metcalfe) made the point that there have been no prosecutions to date for FGM. Legislation was first introduced in 1985, but not even a single referral was made to the CPS until 2010. Raising awareness is key, and we all hope that the measures in the Serious Crime Act 2015 and other legislation will prompt more prosecutions and convictions.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire mentioned protection orders and their wording. We had lengthy discussions about the wording of the orders, but I assure her that protection orders are meant specifically to protect girls at risk of FGM; there is no doubt or ambiguity about that. The Serious Crime Act 2015 introduces statutory guidance that will make it clear to all front-line professionals what indicators they should look for and how to ensure that we protect girls, including those being taken abroad who are at risk of FGM. We have played a significant role, as have my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Derbyshire and others, in pushing hidden, sensitive and neglected issues into the spotlight—not only FGM, but sexual violence in conflict and the need to address violence against women and girls in humanitarian emergencies.

We have hosted three major international summits on violence against women and girls: the call to action on protecting women and girls in emergencies; the global summit to end sexual violence in conflict; and the Girl summit, on eliminating female genital mutilation and child, early and forced marriage in a generation. By doing so, and by driving forward the agenda for change, we have cemented our standing as a world player in relation to this important issue.

However, if raising awareness leads to increased reporting of these crimes, then we need to ensure that the systems are in place to manage that increase—not only in the criminal justice system, but across the board. Broader recognition of violence as a public health issue, and specific training on domestic and sexual abuse, means that at every point of contact—whether in A and E, or with a midwife, health visitor, teacher or police officer—there is a greater chance that abuse will be spotted and stopped.

Sadly, I myself had to visit A and E last weekend with my little boy, who was not very well. However, I was very impressed by the way that the health care professionals there treated us as a family and asked what I now consider—with the knowledge I have about this issue—to be really appropriate questions, to get to the bottom of whether there was any risk of abuse within the family relationship. I am pleased to say that they did not think that there was any such risk, and clearly there is not. Nevertheless, I was impressed by the way they handled matters, and I pay tribute to the A and E professionals whom I encountered last weekend.

We have invested more than £600,000 since 2010 to provide training programmes for independent domestic violence advisers and independent sexual violence advisers, an FGM e-learning package and stalking training for professionals. We have also supported enhanced training on VAWG for health visitors and general practitioners, with more than 6,500 professionals having been trained in recognising domestic violence and abuse.

Our investment has had an impact. For example, following intervention by a multi-agency risk assessment conference and an IDVA service, up to 60% of domestic abuse victims reported that there had been no further violence against them. For victims who had engaged with an IDVA following the charge of a perpetrator, 72% reported a complete cessation of abuse, compared with 59% of victims when there was no charge following a report to the police.

We have taken steps to ensure that every agency, including the police, responds to VAWG crimes to maximum effect. In 2013, the Home Secretary commissioned Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary to undertake a comprehensive review on how the police deal with domestic violence, because she was concerned that the response was inadequate. HMIC’s report, published in March 2014, exposed significant failings, including a lack of visible police leadership and direction, poor victim care, and deficiencies in the collection of important evidence.

The Government have been determined to ensure that HMIC’s recommendations are implemented across all police forces, with the establishment of a national oversight group chaired by the Home Secretary. Every police force has now published its own action plan, setting out how it will address the findings of HMIC in its own area.

The Government have ring-fenced nearly £40 million of funding up to the end of 2015 to provide stability for specialist local support services, such as IDVAs and ISVAs, and for national helplines. Of course, that money is for England and Wales. The hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran talked about the situation in Scotland, where this matter is, of course, a devolved issue. Last week, we confirmed that that funding for England and Wales will continue at the same level into 2015-16 for those services, with an additional £10 million up to March 2016 for the funding for refuges.

My hon. Friend the Member for Brentford and Isleworth talked about the Chiswick refuge. Of course, that was the starting point for the Refuge charity, one of the leading charities in this sector. I was delighted to visit its head office recently and to learn about so much that they are doing to protect victims of sexual and domestic abuse. We have also announced an uplift of £7 million in additional funding to support victims of sexual abuse during the next two years, which will provide a critical bedrock of support to victims.

Of course, we have to get things right locally. We need to support local areas to get their responses to violence and abuse, and their provision of services to victims, right and correct on the ground. We have devolved power, resources and accountability to local areas, which is the right thing to do. Local areas are best placed to make decisions about local need. However, we need to ensure that they deliver those services in a consistent way.

In conclusion, we have made significant progress during the course of this Parliament and we have seen some encouraging outcomes. However, when it comes to violence against women and girls, we can never be complacent. There is always more to do to ensure that no woman ever suffers in silence or lives in fear of violence.

16:44

Sitting adjourned without Question put (Standing Order No. 10(11)).